I have a confession to make: Sometimes, speaking te reo Māori scares me more around other Māori than it does around anyone else.
We talk constantly about revitalisation. Kōrero Māori. Normalise te reo Māori. Use what you have, as much as you can. Kia kaha te reo Māori. I believe in all of it, but no one really wants to talk about what happens when the spaces created for te reo Māori start feeling intimidating to the very people trying to grow within it.
There is a strange kind of pressure that can come with speaking te reo Māori when you know someone in the room is listening for every misplaced particle, every kupu you should have known, every sentence that comes out slightly too Pākehā. Sometimes the whakamā arrives before the words do. And here's the part I'm probably not supposed to say, but someone has to: sometimes there can be an elitism around te reo Māori.
Not everywhere. Not everyone. And certainly not because fluency itself is elitist. Kaikōrero, kaiako, and reo champions have carried an enormous burden to ensure te reo survives at all. Their mātauraka deserves respect. But if revitalisation is the goal, we also have to be able to question the culture developing around the language.
Because even fluent speakers are still learning. There is always another whakataukī, another mita, another kupu, another depth of meaning waiting for us. Yet somehow we have created spaces where admitting “I don't know” can feel embarrassing. What's up with that?
A living language needs excellence, but it also needs messiness. It needs learners to stumble through sentences. It needs cousins to throw Māori words into English conversations. It needs people getting things wrong, being corrected with manaakitaka, and trying again.
Accessibility isn't just whether free classes exist. It's whether people feel safe enough to open their mouths once they get there.
Maybe protecting te reo Māori doesn't only mean guarding its integrity. Maybe it also means guarding people's courage to speak it. A language cannot grow if everyone is terrified of getting it wrong.
