Māori sentence structure: how a sentence is built

A Māori sentence opens with a small word that sets the time, then the verb, then whoever is doing it: Kei te kai au. ‘I am eating.’ is, word for word, is-now eat I. The verb never changes, there is no word for am, is or are, and everything after the doer is a row of short phrases that each begin with a small word of their own.

Updated 14 October 2026 · 11 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

Māori word order: marker, verb, doer, the rest

English builds a sentence around the doer: I am drinking the water. Māori builds it around the action. Linguists describe the language as mostly verb–subject–object, and in an everyday sentence the slots come in this order:

Put together: Kei te inu au i te wai. ‘I am drinking the water.’ Change the doer and nothing else moves: Kei te moe te pēpi. ‘The baby is sleeping.’, Kei te kai rātou. ‘They are eating.’ The verb is the same word for everyone, so there is nothing to conjugate.

One small word is easy to miss. When the doer is a person’s name, it takes a in front: Kei te haere a Mere. ‘Mere is going.’ Māori marks a personal name wherever one turns up, and you will see the same a again below.

The five Māori tense markers: kei te, e … ana, i, kua, ka

The time of a sentence is set by the word in front of the verb. There are five you need for everyday Māori, and the verb stays exactly as you learned it in all of them:

Compare what a European language asks for. A Spanish verb has a different ending for each person in each tense. A Māori verb has one form, and five short words do the rest. That is the easy half of the story. The other half is that the markers do not line up one-to-one with English tenses, and three differences are worth learning early.

I and kua: the event, and what it left behind

Both are past, and they are not interchangeable. I kai au. reports a thing that happened. Kua kai au. reports the situation now: I have eaten, so I am not hungry. English draws the same line between I ate and I have eaten, which gives a test that works: if have fits the English sentence, the Māori is kua.

The same test explains why kua takes no time word. I have eaten yesterday is wrong in English, and for the same reason the Māori is I kai au inanahi. ‘I ate yesterday.’ Naming the day turns it back into an event. More of the kua shape: Kua mutu te mahi. ‘The work has finished.’, Kua tae mai ia. ‘He has arrived.’

Ka: the future, and also “and then”

Ka haere au. ‘I will go.’ is how the course first teaches ka, and with nothing before it that is what it means. But what ka really marks is an action getting under way, and inside a story that is already in the past it reads as and then: I haere au ki te whare. Ka kite au i a Mere. ‘I went to the house. Then I saw Mere.’ The second sentence is not in the future. The first one set the time, and ka moved the story on one step.

So a chain of events is built by setting the scene once with i and letting ka carry each step after it: I kai au. Ka moe au. ‘I ate. Then I slept.’

Kei te belongs to now

English lets a present tense reach into the future: I’m going tomorrow. In Māori the plain future marker is ka, whatever time word follows: Ka haere au āpōpō. ‘I will go tomorrow.’ The time word sits at the end and adds information; it is the marker at the front that sets the tense. Te Aka Māori Dictionary does record kei te for continuing action in the present or future, so you will meet it there, but the course teaches ka for what has not started yet, and that is the choice that is never wrong.

The other present marker, e … ana, is not tied to now in the same way. It says an action is in progress and takes its time from the sentences around it: I haere au ki te whare. E kai ana rātou. ‘I went to the house. They were eating.’ For something happening as you speak the two mean the same, and kei te is the everyday choice.

The object takes i, and a person takes i a

A Māori noun has no ending to show whether it is doing the action or having it done to it. A small word carries that instead. The thing acted on is marked with i:

• Kei te inu au i te wai. ‘I am drinking the water.’
• I kai rātou i te kai. ‘They ate the food.’

When the object is a person’s name or a pronoun, it is i a: I kite au i a Mere. ‘I saw Mere.’ That is the same a that stood in front of Mere when she was the doer. It announces that a person is coming, in a language that, spoken aloud, has no capital letters to help.

This is also why the order of a Māori sentence is fixed where German’s, say, is free. German marks each noun with a case ending and can then move it about. Māori adds nothing to the words at all, so position and the small words are the whole grammar.

Sentences with no verb: ko, he and kei

Te reo Māori has no verb to be. Where English says is, a small word at the front of the sentence does the work, and which one depends on what kind of thing you are saying.

Ko points at the one: a name, a particular person or thing. The word he says what kind of thing something is, or what it is like, and a description never takes ko. A describing sentence leads with the quality: He nui te whare. ‘The house is big.’

Location works the same way, and here the small word carries the time as well. Kei te whare au. ‘I am at the house.’ is now, I te kura ia inanahi. ‘He was at school yesterday.’ is past, and Hei te marae tātou āpōpō. ‘We’ll be at the marae tomorrow.’ is still to come. There is no am, was or will be in any of them.

That makes kei te a pair of words to read carefully. Before a verb it is the present marker: Kei te kai au. Before a place it is at the: Kei te kura au. The word that follows decides. And ki is different again, since it means to: Kei te haere au ki te kura. ‘I am going to school.’

There is no everyday verb to have either. Having is said with a possessive: He pukapuka tāku. ‘I have a book.’, literally a book is mine. Which word for my that takes is the subject of the a and o categories: tāku or tōku.

Describing words follow the noun

English says the big house. Māori says te whare nui, the house big. The describing word comes after what it describes, and it does not change for number any more than the noun does. The small word in front carries the plural: te whare ‘the house’, ngā whare ‘the houses’. The one common exception to the order is tino ‘very’, which goes in front: He tino pai te kai. ‘The food is very good.’

A long sentence is a row of short phrases

A long Māori sentence looks like a wall of small words until you see that every phrase in it opens with one. Cut the sentence at those words and it falls into pieces you already know. Take I haere a Mere ki te toa i te ata. ‘Mere went to the shop in the morning.’

The verb phrase and the doer keep their places. The phrases after them are extra information, and another can be added in the same way: I haere a Mere ki te toa me tōna hoa. ‘Mere went to the shop with her friend.’, where me is with. English hides its structure inside word order. Māori announces it at the front of every phrase, which is why long sentences are easier to read than they look.

How to make a Māori sentence negative: kāore

English makes a sentence negative by dropping in not. Māori puts kāore at the front, and then two things happen: a pronoun doer jumps forward to stand straight after it, and some of the markers change.

The last row is the one to notice. The negative of kua is kāore anō … kia, not yet, which is why the everyday exchange runs Kua kai koe? Kāore anō. ‘Have you eaten? Not yet.’

The sentences with no verb split two ways. One that names or classifies, built with ko or he, takes a different word, ehara: He kaiako ia. becomes Ehara ia i te kaiako. ‘He isn’t a teacher.’, and with a name it is Ehara tēnei i a Mere. ‘This isn’t Mere.’ One that describes takes kāore after all: Kāore te kai i te pai. ‘The food isn’t good.’ The test is the English. If is a fits, the word is ehara; if it is is good or is big, it is kāore.

A command has its own negative, kaua e: Kaua e haere! ‘Don’t go!’ And kāo is only the answer no to a question; it does not make a sentence negative.

How to ask a question in Māori

English drags the question word to the front and reorders the verb. Māori does neither. The question word stands in the slot the answer will fill, so the question and its answer have the same shape:

A yes-or-no question has no question word at all. It is the statement, said as a question: Kei te haere koe? ‘Are you going?’ The voice does the work, and a tag on the end does the same job as isn’t it: He pai, nē? ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ Once you can say the statement, you can already ask the question.

What English speakers get wrong

• Putting the doer first. It is Kei te kai au., with the doer after the verb.
• Looking for “is”. There is no such word. Kei te harikoa au. ‘I’m happy.’ has a marker, a state and a doer, and nothing else.
• Leaving out the object’s i. Without it the sentence cannot say which noun is acted on.
• Forgetting the a before a name. a Mere as the doer, i a Mere as the object.
• Letting the time word set the tense. A word like āpōpō ‘tomorrow’ does not make a sentence future. The marker does, and for a plain future it is ka.
• Leaving the doer behind in a negative. After kāore the pronoun moves up: Kāore au i te haere. ‘I am not going.’

The pattern behind all of it

Every section of this page is the same idea. Māori words do not change shape, so a small word in front of each phrase says what the phrase is doing: the tense in front of the verb, i in front of the object, a in front of a name, te or ngā in front of a noun. Learn to hear those words and the grammar is mostly in view. The one place a verb does change shape is the passive, which Māori uses far more than English does; that and the rest of the difficult parts are weighed up in is te reo Māori hard to learn.

The doer slot is where Māori asks for more than English, because its pronouns count the people and say whether the listener is one of them: see Māori pronouns: tāua, māua, tātou, mātou. For whole sentences ready to use, common Māori phrases sets them out by situation. The free te reo Māori course teaches each marker on this page in its own lesson, in this order, and the most common Māori words are listed by frequency.

The shortest complete texts most people write in Māori are greetings, and Māori email greetings takes them apart word by word.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Māori language — mostly verb–subject–object order; almost no inflection; the verbal particles i, kei te, kua, e … ana and ka; the locative particles ki, kei, i and hei; how kāore changes the particles (citing Biggs 1998, Bauer 1997 and Bauer, Evans and Parker 2001).
2. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kei te — before a verb, continuing action in the present or future; before a noun, “at the, in the”.
3. Wikipedia: Verb–subject–object word order.