A subreddit for those interested in the Māori language. Mō te hunga e hiahia ana ki te akoako, ki te kōrero i te reo Māori.
Kia ora! i am Māori on my fathers side and my family name is Wikaira. I was wondering if this could be translated into English or what this name means? I’ve tried to break the word down to find a possible meaning but it seems difficult and I don’t speak te reo, so I wouldn’t really know. I don’t think any of my family really know either. thanks !
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It looks like a transliteration of an English or other foreign name to me, but not sure what the origin name would be.
Thank you! will look into it further - i’ve seen some old photographs and records from the late 1800s of people with the same last name, so I could trace it back further perhaps. Was it common for Maori to adopt a transliterated version of a European name for easier pronunciation?
Yes. See here for some other examples - unfortunately not Wikaira but Vickers is a good guess.
I think it’s a transliteration- original English name could be something like Vickers?
thank you ! and yea you’re probably right. i know that some surnames got transliterated into maori but wasn’t sure if that was the case with mine
I’ve found that transliterated names which don’t have any whakapapa basis (to a Pākehā ancestor) usually come from Missionary names (or names connected to the Mission if not the missionaries themselves) or important Pākehā officials, or very early settler Pākehā, if that helps.
There was an S (probably Samuel) Vickers advertising in the Taranaki Herald as a shipping agent in the early 1850s according to Papers Past. At that time Māori still outnumbered the Pākehā population in NZ.
Is it possible that this person, or another Vickers (if we are assuming that Wikaira is a transliteration of that name), just married into the family and then the name was transliterated later to make pronunciation easier for Māori not accustomed to speaking English?