Face Up to Reality

A Little Used Language on Life-Support

We hope that commentator, Mike Hoskings has a security detail.  He has dared to question publicly the official attempts to preserve the Maori language.  For thirty years or so, Te Reo Maori has been made a cause célèbre amongst some Maori and heaps of politically correct bureaucrats.  But it remains an endangered language.  People just don't want to use the language, let alone learn it. 

Some  radicals have pushed to make Te Reo a compulsory subject in government schools.

Here is Hosking's piece--which, as you read it you would do well to bear in mind that he has possibly, if not probably, committed career suicide.

More on the Maori Language

The Sad Fate of the Dodo

Making Maori an official language of the country and committing millions of tax-extracted State money to the propagation and teaching of Te Reo have had the unintended consequence of seeing a decline in Te Reo competence and use.  In effect, it has removed the language out of its cultural context--and without that life force it cannot survive.

Desperate calls for Te Reo to be made compulsory in all government schools represents a doubling down on folly and will end up doing even more damage to the language--just as facility in reading, writing, and maths has declined under the intrinsic incompetence of compulsory government education.  Since the government school system makes a virtue out of teaching pupils nothing but what they themselves want to learn, what hope is there for the Maori language if it becomes subject to such pedagogical inanity?

Professor Paul Moon--an expert on Maori and the NZ colonial period--has written an excellent piece on the Maori language and its prospects.  He sets it in the broader context of the extensive decline and extinction of languages over the last century.  [NZ Herald]  He asserts that this bleak general trend is worsening.  A key issue is who ends up speaking the language and the brute reality is that Maori has not broken out of its ethnic constraints. It remains a race-based language, unable to break out of its cultural constraints.  Other languages have broken that barrier and proved to be more acquisitive of speakers and more dynamic in adjustment and change.

Holding Maori Language Week in the chill of winter somehow makes the challenges that Te Reo face seem that much bleaker.  It's certainly a tough world out there for minority languages, especially those battling against the relentless onslaught of English.

Field of Dreams

Build It and They Will Come

The attempt to revive the Maori language, making New Zealand a genuinely bi-lingual nation was the stuff of dreams.  But, the protagonists of the dream made a fatal tactical mistake.  Substituting appearance and image for reality, they turned to the State.  By accessing taxpayer funding, Maori language instruction from pre-school onwards would ensure the survival and prospering of the Te Reo--or so all parties believed. 

But "top down" in such matters never works.  If a culture is to survive, if a language is to continue, it needs to be inculcated in hearth and home from parents to children.  No amount of state funded schooling is going to make up for parental neglect.  The old adage, "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world" still holds. 

The state funded initiative to revive the Maori language through government schools has been running for forty years--almost half a century.  The results?  Dr Timoti Karetu is described as one of the leading experts on the Maori language.  He has issued a report card on how the language is progressing.