Editorial: Making an effort with language

FILE

It shouldn't really take a dedicated week to make us recognise our national language. Truth be told, I don't have a lot of right to go preaching about te reo.

My knowledge is, embarrassingly, rather limited.

But with awareness weeks around everything these days, it seems only fitting we have one dedicated to te reo.

I doubt I'll ever be fluent. I may never know more than the odd sentence but this week - Te Wiki o te reo Maori - is a reminder that I need to make more of an effort.

I'm confident that with my children growing up in Rotorua, they're set to get a head start - but what's taught at school needs to be reinforced at home.

Even now they are as likely to refer to their stomach as their puku, their ears as their taringa and to e tu or e noho than to stand up or sit down.

It's not much - but the fact that it's part of their everyday vocabulary has to be an encouraging start.

In a world where children are as likely to pick up Spanish from cartoons like Dora the Explorer or to address people in Chinese thanks to another cartoon, it's a reminder to make sure they're exposed to books and shows that also include plenty of te reo.

Timely, too, is the video posted by a 15-year-old Kapiti School student urging New Zealanders to stop mangling the language.

The video, picked up by overseas websites and with more than 120,000 views, is a good reminder for us all to make more of an effort.

A childhood friend posted the link saying that at 30-odd, people still couldn't get her name right and she'd resorted to letting them shorten it to make it easier.

A part of my heart sunk that for close to three decades we'd been calling her by her shortened name - not because that's what she preferred, but because she was sick of people bungling it up.

From now on, I'll be making more of an effort.