Reviving Te Reo Māori

Te reo Māori carries with it the essence of our whenua and our place within it. Recently Professor Joshua Fishman, a world expert on language revitalisation, was in Christchurch, and provided some advice to our local Māorilanguage community. He highlighted some issues surrounding how to successfully revive te reo Māori so that it is spoken as a living language.

One of the points that Professor Fishman made was that te reo cannot be compartmentalised into a few hours a week, and left at that, as with other school subjects. "A real not institutional social space has to be created for the language." It is vital that the language is spoken in everyday life, in work and play and in whnau and social settings.

The principle focus, according to Professor Fishman, is that the language must be spoken as the first language in the home. We cannot rely on schools to do all the work if we want our children to be competent speakers of Māori , the language must be 'normalised'. The language needs to be spoken in the home and in the child's community in order for it to survive and thrive. The Fishman family proved this for their own language Yiddish, which they have helped revive. They created a Yiddish-speaking community for their own children by living next to two other families that were committed to bringing up their children with Yiddish as the sole language of communication in the home. Those children became each others playmates, thus making it a normal part of life.

Professor Fishman's visit was a healthy reminder for those of us with young children to speak Māori to them as much as possible and for parents to speak to each other in te reo if we are able. We must also keep feeding that hunger for the language within ourselves, so that one less generation will need to struggle with being a second language learner of our own treasured language.

Speaking from personal experience as a second language learner of te reo Māori , it is often quite a struggle to be learning as an adult. In any Māori speaking environment I used to have to just switch off, essentially separating myself from the richness of my culture. Now I am at least proficient enough to listen to what is being said, and to be able to understand much of what is being said. As I use te reo more in an every day setting, and learn more of the structures and vocabulary, I am able to enter into that world more, and even begin to engage in it.

However anything Māori in New Zealand is always loaded with political undertones, and merely speaking our own language in public is very much a political statement. What I would dearly love is to help change this situation by the time my own children are grown up.

I was at a mothers' meeting recently, where there was a fairly good proportion of mothers who were bringing their children up in bilingual households of various languages. The other Māori speaking mother in the room expressed how difficult it was for her to maintain speaking Māori to her daughter in public because of the stares that she got from other people. It was interesting that none of the other mothers seemed to carry this whakama or shyness at speaking their own language in a public setting.

Perhaps by increasing people's exposure to te reo on a day to day basis, some of that fear of the unknown may be broken down? It will no longer be a 'freak show' every time you say "kia tere", or "haere mai e kare" to your little one out in the street.

For people who want their children to be bilingual, Fishman believes they need to be immersed in te reo for their first two years as much as is possible. Any age after that they will always be a 'second language learner'. In his book Stabilising indigenous languages, Professor Fishman advises to "aim low" in terms of where to pitch your resources when trying to save a language. "Start exactly where the mother tongue starts and try to aim at that ... Most languages are not institutional, but informal and spontaneous. That is where language lives. Children live; they play; they laugh; they fall; they argue; they jump; they want; they scream".

Kia kaha e ngā matua maha e whai ana ki te reo me ona tikanga. Karawhiua!

Ariana Tikao