Tapu Misa: Almost unnoticed, Maori infiltrates our language

It hadn't taken the Australian journalist long to notice our linguistic quirks. She had been reading the newspaper when she came across a Maori word that had her racing for the dictionary. She was intrigued at the casual expectation that the reader would understand it.

After that, she started taking note of the regularity with which Maori words kept tripping off the tongues of non-Maori; words like mana, whanau, taonga, iwi and waka. It seemed significant, especially since she couldn't offer an Aboriginal equivalent.

I had noticed it, too, writing for the Herald after an absence of 12 years. In the old days we had had to italicise Maori as if it were a foreign language, giving the meaning of even the most commonly used words.

We don't do that any more. That seemed like progress to me, especially compared with the furore caused 20 years ago when a Post Office tolls operator was harassed by her supervisor for daring to greet callers with "kia ora". The supervisor insisted she use an English greeting on the grounds that every other culture might demand their own salutation.

It made the front page. Airline pilots started using kia ora, and the switchboard ran hot with people wanting to speak to the kia ora lady. The Prime Minister of the day, Rob Muldoon, finally put an end to it when he declared that he didn't care if she said "kee uh or ra" as long as she didn't say "Gidday, Blue".

(It was Muldoon, after all, who famously quipped that Kiwi migration to Australia raised average IQ levels on both sides of the Tasman.)

I had enthused to a friend that all this mainstream use of Maori was a sign of greater acceptance in Pakeha society of things Maori, and maybe Pacific, too.

He scoffed, being a great deal older and more cynical.

But the historian and writer Michael King was more inclined to be optimistic when I talked to him a while back. It wasn't just Maori words being adopted into mainstream culture, he said, but the concepts behind them.

For example, it has become commonplace at our universities for people to take a whanau support group to their job interview. That has happened because Maori insisted on having them, and others have claimed the same right.

King has noticed also that Pakeha funerals have become much more like tangi and less like the quick and almost impersonal affairs of his childhood.

What's interesting is that these and other changes have come almost without our noticing it and because we've seen some sense in them. We've adopted words such as mana and tapu simply because there are no comparable English words for them.

King reckons that has been the inevitable consequence of Maori and Pakeha finally getting the chance to rub shoulders since the 1950s, when Maori started migrating to the cities. The influx of migrants from the Pacific and now Asia has added to that constantly evolving Kiwi culture.

And while it might suit some to see us as being in constant cultural strife, King's view is that after the initial pain of adjusting to each others' different ways we've done okay once we settled down and made an effort to get to know each other.

Cultural influences cut both ways, of course.

A few months ago, I met the offspring of a Te Arawa woman and a Samoan man, who had met and married here in the 1920s. He had returned to Samoa after his wife died, taking his daughters with him.

The boys left behind with the whanau grew up speaking Maori and the girls Samoan, which made for interesting family reunions. But that wasn't the only difference. When the kaumatua visited his Samoan kin earlier this year, he told me he had noticed that Maori had become more "Pakehafied" than Samoans.

The same can be said for those of us Pacific Islanders and Asians who have grown up here. Truth be told, we often have more in common with each other than our recently arrived cousins. That's the dilemma for migrant families who want to engage but fear their children being lost to the host culture.

Last week at Korean Night - now there's a community putting itself out to know and be known to Kiwis - a woman told me that her younger son already prefers Kiwi food to the spicy Korean food. He keeps pestering her to cook potatoes and fries and, of course, she obliges, if rather grudgingly.

Her English, by the way, would barely have rated a 5, but it's amazing how much you can convey with a little enthusiasm and a lot of hand-waving. It got me thinking again that proficiency in English is not the most important consideration for a country such as ours, with obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi.

The ideal immigrants are just as likely to arrive with nothing more than a burning ambition to build a better life for themselves and their families. But they should be willing to embrace things Maori as well as Pakeha, and to learn this country's history.

Then again, that should go for all of us.