Speaking our language

Kia ora koutou! Haere mai, nau mai ki te Wiki o te Reo Maori!
Hello and welcome to Maori Language Week. This year's theme is Kia ora te reo Maori and the week, an annual event, runs from September 11-17.
Why is the Maori language important? Why should we devote an entire week to it?
Good question. I believe we should devote more than one week to one of New Zealand's official languages. And here's something else - while English is the language most commonly spoken in this country. It is not an "official" language - Maori and New Zealand Sign Language are the only ones to be deemed official, and yet English is the language compulsory in schools.

I believe Maori Language Week to be an acknowledgement of its official status plus it's a chance every year for non-Maori speakers to be encouraged to learn at least a little.

We live in a country that uses Maori unashamedly in a vast number of contexts, from place names to company names to casual greetings, as well as in a ceremonial form at public occasions. Our national rugby team uses it before a match to strike fear into the hearts of its opponents. But more than any of those, it is being used as a daily form of communication by families and in schools all over the country. Contrary to what we are constantly being told by those who oppose its use, Maori is a living, growing tongue, gaining traction in a country dominated by a more recently introduced language. Like that other language, it is evolving with new words being added to keep up with the times and stay abreast of technology. It would be wrong to suggest that process is diluting te reo Maori - I believe it is enriching it. English, nor any other language, is neither too shy nor too precious to adapt foreign words and phrases.

Those of us who do not speak Te Reo are missing out on something quite beautiful, and it really wouldn't hurt us to learn, at least a little. But we can certainly start with getting the pronunciation right.

There are about six Maori dialects (mita) in Aotearoa and this part of the country has its own distinctions, including the way we pronounce the letter 'h' and the sound designated by 'wh'. So the way we pronounce Whanganui is not necessarily the same as the rest of the country pronounces it. That's something we have to live with, the same way they have to put up with the way we pronounce place names in other parts of New Zealand which may not match their particular mita.

In saying that, New Zealanders have a poor record of Maori pronunciation, something that could be rectified - if we really wanted to. It all starts with the vowel sounds - which are constant - and the letter 'r', and the rest, with some practice and a little knowledge, falls into place.

As part of the language's re-establishment in Aotearoa, there is an accepted, standardised form and mita. Its origins are the North Island's east coast, where they pronounce the 'wh' as 'f', and that is the form taught in universities and tertiary education centres, in the same way that 'received pronunciation' of English took precedence over other English dialects in an attempt to standardise its use in the 19th century. It came from the sounds made by 'educated' people in the south of England and found its way into such standard bearers of the language as the BBC.

In much the same way, the East Coast form of Maori has become the text book version of the language here. Meanwhile, regions still use and teach their own mita to preserve their way of speaking. It's a common thing, and we find it all over the world. A country standardises its language while allowing regional dialects to flourish alongside.

Learning Maori in its own country has been made easy by the proliferation of educational opportunities everywhere. In Whanganui we have Te Wananga o Aotearoa where classes in Maori culture and language are not only free, but are made available during the day or evening to allow people the flexibility to attend.

It is also becoming more available in schools and, while logistically it would be difficult to implement its compulsory inclusion in the curriculum, it would be good to see it take a higher priority.

There are some who would question its usefulness outside the education arena, and many of those people would have learned Latin, a language no longer spoken by its founding community.

Maori is the living language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, or Aotearoa, if you will, and as such it deserves to be treated with respect and knowledgeability. While many of us will never learn to speak it well, if at all, we could at least acknowledge its rightful place by learning how to say the words we do use correctly.