Māori vs Hawaiian: how similar are they?

Closely related, but not close enough to understand each other. Māori and Hawaiian descend from the same ancestor and share much of their basic vocabulary, changed by regular sound shifts: Māori whare ‘house’ is Hawaiian hale ‘house’, rua ‘two’ is lua ‘two’ and toru ‘three’ is kolu ‘three’. Their grammar is built the same way. But they are two languages, and in the one study that measured it, Hawaiian listeners understood about a quarter of what a Māori speaker said.

Updated 4 October 2026 · 9 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.

The short answer

Māori and Hawaiian are both Eastern Polynesian languages, which makes them cousins rather than siblings: each is closer to other languages than to the other. Once you know a handful of sound correspondences, a large share of everyday Hawaiian vocabulary turns into Māori and back again, and the grammar runs on the same skeleton of small particles, verb-first sentences and pronouns that count people. What the correspondences do not do is make the two understandable to each other in conversation. A Māori speaker in Honolulu would recognise a lot of words and still miss most of the sentence.

How are Māori and Hawaiian related?

Both belong to the Polynesian family, which divides into a western group (Tongan, Samoan and their neighbours) and an eastern one. Within Eastern Polynesian, the subgrouping set out by the archaeologist and linguist Roger Green in 1966 makes Rapa Nui, the language of Easter Island, a branch on its own, and splits the rest into two groups:

• Tahitic: Tahitian, Rarotongan (Cook Islands Māori), New Zealand Māori and the languages of the Tuamotus.
• Marquesic: Marquesan, Mangarevan and Hawaiian.

Te Ara, the encyclopedia of New Zealand, places te reo Māori in the same Tahitic branch. So Māori’s nearest relatives across the Pacific are Cook Islands Māori, Tahitian and the languages of the Tuamotus, not Hawaiian. When James Cook reached New Zealand in 1769, the Tahitian high chief Tupaia, sailing with him, found, in Joseph Banks’s words, that the language of the people “was so like his own that he could tolerably well understand them and they him”. Green’s evidence also suggested that Hawaiʻi was first settled from the Marquesas, with later influence from the Society Islands, and Hawaiian shows signs of later borrowing from Tahitian.

So the Māori–Hawaiian relationship runs through a common Eastern Polynesian ancestor, not through either language directly. The resemblances are real and systematic, but they are the kind you find between cousins.

The sound correspondences

The two languages have small, similar sound systems. Māori writes ten consonants: h, k, m, n, p, r, t, w and the two digraphs ng and wh. Hawaiian writes eight: h, k, l, m, n, p, w and the ʻokina, the glottal stop. Both have the same five vowels, short and long, and both mark a long vowel with a macron, which Hawaiian calls the kahakō. Where the consonants differ, they differ regularly: the same ancestral sound comes out one way in Māori and another in Hawaiian, word after word.

Two words show several shifts at once. tangata ‘person’ becomes kanaka ‘person’, with both ts turned to k and the ng to n; rangi ‘sky’ becomes lani ‘sky’, with r to l and ng to n. The word for the language carries the pattern too: Māori reo ‘voice, language’ is Hawaiian leo ‘voice’, though Hawaiian’s everyday word for a language is ʻōlelo ‘language’.

So does the name of the people. Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives māori as an ordinary word meaning “normal, usual, natural”; its use for the people of Aotearoa came about after contact with Europeans, to tell Māori apart from newcomers. Its Hawaiian cognate is maoli ‘native, genuine, real’, as in Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians. The r has become l as usual, and the long first vowel of Māori is short in Hawaiian: vowel length does not always line up.

Numbers 1 to 10 in Māori and Hawaiian

The numbers are the clearest demonstration, because nine of the ten line up. Hawaiian commonly puts the prefix ʻe- in front of a number (Pukui and Elbert give ʻehā keiki, “four children”), so the table shows both the bare Hawaiian word and the form you will usually hear.

Ten is the odd one out. Te Aka notes that tekau ‘ten’ originally meant twenty, “as it, or its cognate forms, do in other eastern Polynesian languages”, while Pukui and Elbert trace Hawaiian ʻumi ‘ten’ to a different Proto-Polynesian word. Five has a footnote of its own: Hawaiian lima means both “five” and “hand”, as the ancestral word did, but Māori uses rima ‘five’ for the number and ringa ‘hand, arm’ for the hand, a form POLLEX marks as phonologically irregular. How Māori builds eleven, twenty and a thousand out of these ten is in Māori numbers, days and months.

More Māori and Hawaiian cognates

Every pair below is listed as a cognate pair in POLLEX, the Polynesian Lexicon Project, and checked in Te Aka and in Pukui and Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary. The meanings are close, but not always identical.

Where the meanings drift, they drift in ways worth knowing. aloha ‘hello, love’ is a greeting in Hawaiian as well as a word for love; Māori aroha ‘love, compassion’ is not a greeting at all. Māori greets with kia ora ‘hello’ or tēnā koe ‘hello, to one person’, and aroha mai ‘sorry’ is an apology. Māori greetings has the full set of hellos and goodbyes.

Grammar: the same skeleton

The grammar is where the family resemblance is strongest, more than the vocabulary. Neither language changes its verbs for person or tense; small particles in front of the verb carry tense and aspect instead. And both normally put the verb first, so “I am eating” comes out in the order “is-eating I”:

• Māori: Kei te kai au. ‘I am eating’
• Hawaiian: Ke ʻai nei au. ‘I am eating’

The particles differ (Māori frames the present with kei te before the verb, Hawaiian with ke before it and nei after it), but the shape of the sentence is the same, and the pronoun au ‘I’ is shared.

The words for the follow the sound rules. Māori singular te corresponds to Hawaiian ka and ke (ke before a, e, o, k and a few other words), and Pukui and Elbert trace ke to the same ancestral te. “The house” is te whare in Māori and ka hale in Hawaiian. The plurals, which POLLEX lists as cognates, are ngā and nā, with ng to n again. A few nouns even make their plural the same way in both, by lengthening a vowel: wahine ‘woman’ and wāhine ‘women’, wahine ‘woman’ and wāhine ‘women’; matua ‘parent’ and mātua ‘parents’, makua ‘parent’ and mākua ‘parents’.

The pronouns are the most striking match. Both languages have a dual as well as a plural, and both make you say whether the person you are talking to is included in “we”:

In Māori, t- takes the listener in and m- leaves them out. In Hawaiian the inclusive marker is k-, which Pukui and Elbert trace to the same Proto-Polynesian ta: the t-to-k shift, working inside the grammar. Possession is split the same way too. Both languages sort what you own into an a class and an o class: food goes in the a class and parents in the o class, in Māori and in Hawaiian alike.

Can Māori and Hawaiian speakers understand each other?

Not easily, and this is one of the few Polynesian pairs where it has actually been measured, if only in one direction. Early European visitors thought the Polynesian islands spoke one language: Cook called the speech of Hawaiʻi, Tahiti, Tonga and New Zealand “indisputably the same”. Between 1959 and 1961, Jack Ward of the University of Hawaiʻi set out to test that. He recorded speakers from a dozen Polynesian communities, including a Māori teacher living in Hawaiʻi, and played the recordings to listeners from other islands, scoring how much of each sentence and word list they translated correctly.

The Hawaiian listeners picked out about a third of a 100-word basic vocabulary list in Māori, and about a quarter of the key words in Māori sentences. Samoan listeners, whose language is Western Polynesian, did about as well on the Māori recording. No Māori listeners were available, so how well a Māori speaker follows Hawaiian was never measured. The study is small, with one Māori voice and three Hawaiian listeners, and more than sixty years old, so treat the numbers as an indication rather than a verdict. They agree with what the sound correspondences predict: recognisable words, but not enough of them, at conversational speed, to follow what is being said.

Shared vocabulary goes less far in speech than it looks on paper even between languages as close as Spanish and Portuguese: a Spanish speaker can read a Portuguese newspaper with some effort and still be lost in a Brazilian conversation, as Portuguese vs Spanish sets out.

Learning one after the other

If you already know Hawaiian, Māori will feel familiar from the first lesson. The grammar works the same way, the pronoun system is already in your head, and many words become guessable once you swap k for t, l for r and n for ng, and put back a k wherever Hawaiian has an ʻokina. What does not transfer is the particles, the sounds Hawaiian lacks, and every word where the meaning has drifted or the two languages simply chose different words. The Māori pronunciation guide covers wh, ng and the rolled r.

Shared roots still have to be learned as Māori words, in Māori sentences. How many you need, and which come first, is the subject of how many Māori words do you need. Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course teaches them in frequency order, with Papa Reo’s native te reo voice on every example.

Sources

1. Pawley, A. (2010). Roger Green the linguist. Archaeology in New Zealand 53(1): 28–36 (summarising Green, R. C. 1966, Linguistic subgrouping within Polynesia, Journal of the Polynesian Society 75).
2. Higgins, R. and Keane, B. Te reo Māori – the Māori language. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.
3. Ward, J. H. (1962). Mutual intelligibility between certain Polynesian speech communities. MA thesis, University of Hawaiʻi.
4. Greenhill, S. J. and Clark, R. POLLEX-Online: The Polynesian Lexicon Project Online.
5. Te Aka Māori Dictionary.
6. Pukui, M. K. and Elbert, S. H. (1986). Hawaiian Dictionary, via Wehewehe Wikiwiki.
7. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Hawaiʻinuiākea. Ua Ao Hawaiʻi: Papa ʻUmi (1 April 2020).
8. Wikipedia: Hawaiian alphabet
9. Wikipedia: Hawaiian grammar