Features

Maori Language Week has been and gone for another year and, as always, its presence was most perceptibly marked by the embarrassingly eager bilingual efforts of television broadcasters, whether it be John Campbell’s ‘kee-ora, good evening, hairy-my New Zealand!’ or ‘celebrity’ chef Richard Till’s endeavours on the Countdown ads – ‘we’ve made some good kai today, car pie!’

Perhaps we didn't really notice – or even care - but for this year’s Maori Language Week, the pressure was on. It fell under the shadow of the Waitangi Tribunal’s 2010 report, which proclaimed that the Maori language is dying out, ‘approaching a crisis point’. Given the strong presence of Maori language in broadcasting and political spheres, this may seem surprising. But according to the report, at grassroots level in the communities, strategies to save the language are failing. Statistics paint an alarming picture: in 2006, census data showed that less than a quarter of all Maori could hold an everyday conversation in Te Reo. The failure, the Tribunal concluded, did not lie in Maori ‘rejection of their language’ but rather in the government’s failure ‘to give it adequate oxygen and support’.
 
There are seven thousand languages in the world, and every two weeks, one of them dies. At this rate, it is estimated that about three thousand of them will be dead by the end of the century. That’s right, the extinction of a language is referred to as a death. It’s a strangely human concept. But why, you might ask, should we care about endangered languages, when we could care about other things on earth that are dying out, like pandas or dolphins? Languages aren’t even cute.
 
But languages are life. Languages form our identities, our cultures and our histories.  It’s a weird, intangible thing we just happened to learn when we were babies, something we often take for granted – ‘cause it just happens. It rolls off the tongue, reverbs from the vocal cords, or flows from the hands and body, if sign language or interpretive dancing is more your thing. Language gives us friends. It gives us humour, literature, entertainment. Without it, we wouldn’t have the Harry Potter books. We wouldn’t have ‘your mum’ jokes.
 
Maori have long recognised the importance of language, or Te Reo, to their culture. It is a life force. There is even a proverb that describes this concept - ‘Ko te reo te ha te mauri o te Maoritanga’, language is the very life-blood of being Maori. Te Reo Maori is a taonga, a treasure of New Zealand, something that no other country has. But it is becoming more and more in danger of joining the proverbial linguistic graveyard.
 
How have we let this happen? Well, it's already nearly happened before. It took until 1987 for Maori language to even be recognised as an official language of New Zealand, and that only happened because Maori was on the brink of death. Before that, the 1867 Native Schools Act had effectively banned Maori language from schools, as Pakeha became the majority in New Zealand and English became the ruling language. Maori children were cruelly punished for speaking Maori in classrooms or playgrounds and, as a result, a generation was born that associated their native language with a sense of embarrassment and shame, or whakama.
 
In the hundred years following this Act, the number of Maori with Te Reo as their first language had dropped to 26% by the 1960s. With the migration of many Maori into the cities at this time, Maori were ‘pepper potted’ into Pakeha neighbourhoods and encouraged to fully integrate into British New Zealand society. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that the ‘one nation, two peoples’ rhetoric appeared, when Maori leaders recognised their language could be lost forever if it wasn’t given the necessary life support. Maori language underwent a revival in the name of biculturalism.
 
But the volatility of our indigenous language is far from being the only linguistic problem present in New Zealand. Today, New Zealand markets itself on the basis of its multiculturalism. Located in the Pacific, we belong to the most linguistically diverse region on the planet. We have immigrants from all corners of the globe, for many of whom English is not their first language. This fact is celebrated, described as the ‘melting pot’, an expression that gives the air of harmony and acceptance for all cultures. But perhaps we are being melted down too much - into a short sighted, ignorant, maybe even xenophobic nation. Because despite the apparent diversity, we are one of the most monolingual countries in the world.
 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, a great philosopher, once said that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ What does this say about us as a country, then? Our world is severely limited. We are the world’s most isolated developed nation. Sure, our location at the bottom of the globe has had benefits throughout history; it kept us safe during World Wars I and II. But at the same time, it has lulled us into a false sense of security. Many of us feel that, as long as we are safe, why should we care about the outside world? Maybe this is why we are one of the few first-world countries where studying a foreign language in school is not compulsory. Compare us with European nations, in which every high school student has at least a second, but more typically a third language under their belts.
 
We could blame geography. Or we could blame history. Could it be something embedded in our colonial past that we are afraid of any language that our beloved Queen herself did not utter? Are we still that bound to the Union Jack? The chokehold on English is actually a global problem, with many believing that English is the only language that they’ll ever need. It’s the lingua franca, the world’s dominating language. Facebook groups such as ‘If you come to MY country, you learn MY language’, and ‘Speak English or go home’ are constant reminders of the sense of entitlement that English-speakers think they have. But what most people don’t realise is that English is actually only the third most natively spoken language in the world – it falls far behind Mandarin and Spanish. We are living in a Mandarin world.
 
This is something that the Asia New Zealand Foundation’s Director of Education, Vanessa Lee, says that New Zealand students need to recognise, ideally beginning from primary school and continuing right through to university. ‘Kids need to start learning Mandarin at a younger age and more attention needs to be given to it in the curriculum,’ she notes. It’s slowly working. Economic ties with the Asian region, not to mention John Key’s endorsement of learning the language, have seen Mandarin begin to overtake Latin in popularity at high school. But according to Lee, we should be aiming for even more Mandarin students in New Zealand schools and universities. She says young New Zealanders should be ‘prepared for the Asian century’, with all the big firms starting to look towards Asia in their business strategies. And even if you’re not prepared to drop Marketing for Mandarin just yet, Lee advises that university students should at least try for one Asian language paper or even just some culture papers in their degrees.
 
Yet some Pacific Island groups are saying that before we reach out to ‘someone else’s foreign language’, we first need to sort things out back home. Making waves is the Bilingual Leo Pacific Coalition, who are petitioning the Government to recognise and revive Pacific languages in New Zealand. The problem? These languages have absolutely no official recognition here. The Coalition raised the issue that ‘Pacific languages are often treated as foreign and international languages without any status and are currently subject to financial cuts and cutbacks.’ Take Samoan, for example. Despite the fact that there are more than 130,000 Samoans in New Zealand, and the Samoan language is the third most commonly spoken language in the country after English and Maori, it is still classed as a foreign language. This is a breach of human rights, says the Coalition, considering that many Pacific people are actually entitled to New Zealand citizenship based on constitutional arrangements and historical and political ties between the nations.
 
‘Pacific people may be NZ citizens, but apparently we are still to be treated as outsiders, new comers and second class citizens,’ said the Coalition. ‘Research shows that Pacific languages will disappear from NZ and the Islands unless NZ society offers more support to them. If they do not survive here, they will not survive anywhere.’
 
It’s like in Peter Pan, when we’re told that every time you say you don’t believe in fairies, a fairy somewhere dies. Well, maybe the same goes for languages, because surely every time someone says ‘Whack-a-white’ instead of Waikouaiti, or ‘Murray’ instead of Maori, it signals another nail in the coffin for Maori language. It’s all about showing support, whether it be for Te Reo, Samoan, Tongan, Spanish, Sign Language, Mandarin, Blablanga, !Kung, Tsuut’ina, Macanese or Japanese – and perhaps it takes more than just one week of each year to get the message through. Let’s not let languages have their last words.