Paul Moon: Killing Te Reo Māori | Free to Speak

In 2018, historian Paul Moon published a book arguing that te reo Māori is on course to disappear as a living language, and that almost everything being done to revive it is failing. The reaction was immediate and hostile.

Moon's position is that he is a friend of the language, and that a good friend does not offer false comfort. He argues that compulsory language teaching has failed in Wales, Ireland, Luxembourg and Singapore, that fluency figures are self-reported and unverifiable, that no indigenous second language anywhere has been successfully revived, and that te reo risks surviving only in ceremony, the way Latin and Old Slavonic did.

Dane Giraud pushes back throughout: on Israel's revival of Hebrew, on the punishment of Māori children for speaking their language at school, and on whether hostility towards non-Māori learners is part of the problem.

Moon's conclusions are disputed by many te reo scholars and revitalisation practitioners. We publish the conversation because an argument about the survival of a language is worth testing in the open.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:40 The book, and the reaction to it
02:15 Why he wrote it
03:10 Kōhanga Reo, and the smell of an oily rag
05:20 Do the politicians actually mean it?
07:45 Does compulsion work? Wales, Ireland, Luxembourg
10:50 How languages pass between generations
13:00 Language as an ecosystem
14:00 No indigenous second language has ever been revived
14:50 213,000 speakers, so where do you hear it?
16:20 The trouble with self-reported fluency
17:25 The risk of becoming a ceremonial language
19:00 Israel, Hebrew, and why it does not transfer
21:00 The 1820s, when most Pākehā spoke te reo
21:50 Solutions, and why there is no magic pill
25:05 Should non-Māori learn te reo?
27:00 The pronunciation argument
29:20 English: muscular, arrogant, invasive
34:00 Was te reo beaten out of schoolchildren?
35:55 TikTok, and the content problem
37:55 The burning marae

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Free to Speak is the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union: uncensored conversations on free speech, civil liberties, and the people defending them. Hosted by Dane Giraud.

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Transcript

Welcome And The Book’s Provocation

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Free to Speech, the New Zealand Free Speech Union podcast. Subscribe today for uncensored discussion with truly fascinating people and all your latest free speech news, both here in New Zealand and abroad.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Kioda Dane, good. How are you? Good, good. So quite an uplifting uh interview today where we're going to be talking about Paul's 2018 book Killing Teleomordi. Now, uh, did you co-author that one? No, no, that was entirely my own work and my responsibility, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, you're you're responsible for it. No one has to to share the yeah, because it's quite a controversial thesis that you you set out, isn't it? And in in the book on on the potential future or or non-future of Tele Maori?

SPEAKER_02 1:03

I don't know. I think controversy lies in in the hands of the people who react to it. I think it was it was a sober, realistic assessment, and I don't think it was necessarily pessimistic. There is some hope, but really it was a plea for realism. Um I uh I remember someone gave me a very bad review of the book. Um I don't know why, but midway through they actually said they hadn't read it yet, but and they were offended that they hadn't been given a coffee, which was quite unusual. But anyway, so so that's the nature of some of the controversy, which is a bit strange. But I liken it like this. I see myself as a good friend of Toreo. And what I mean by that is that when something's in trouble, a good friend won't say, Don't worry, you'll be fine, and give you sort of false hope. A good friend will confront the issue and say, look, you need to do something, some help is needed. And I believe that Toreo is in some considerable trouble at the moment for a variety of reasons, and drastic situations call for drastic solutions. And I think the whole country needs to focus on this and think about what are the solutions.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Great, great. It's quite interesting because like uh a sober commentary is normally going to be the most controversial commentary. That's why the sober book, yes. So, what

Why Write Killing Te Reo Māori

SPEAKER_01 2:20

is your thesis basically like what what uh what brought you to the book, actually, to begin with?

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Um, I have the fortune of working with people who are lecturers in Tereo, and I think in the education setting, and this is the case around the country, but I know it's the case at AUT for sure, that these are some of the best educators in a general sense that you'll ever come across. They're they're really committed to what they do, they're very professional and they're very effective. Um, but then I pulled the lens back to see what was happening in the country with the language, and my sense of it initially was that it wasn't in good health. The more research I did on this, the more I discovered that was the case. And so that compelled me to look at what's being done, what's working, what isn't working, and what possibly are directions we can head in. And that's really the the impetus for the book.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

So so what is being done. What's the current current strategy that people are using or employing? Oh, there's a few, wouldn't there? Because we're going back to there's Kohangareel, which was early 90s, late 80s.

SPEAKER_02 3:29

Yeah, in the 80s they um Koh Hang is Kohang is an interesting example. That's one of the few examples I think you can hold up and say this is w working really well. And I I've been to went to one Koh Hang about seven or eight times. Um, and I won't name it, but it's it's phenomenally successful.

Kōhanga Reo Success And Starved Funding

SPEAKER_02 3:45

And I don't just mean in terms of language, I mean in terms of general educational experience and so on. This is a a wonderful place.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

If I lived in that area, sorry, Paul, because some people may not know this full immersion. That's right, preschool. Yeah, preschool.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

Preschool. Yeah. And I've talked to the people who run it, very competent people, but they've made it clear to me that they're running on the smell of an oily rag. Now, if you if you're serious, and I think this is really the other thing, this is a plea to be serious about Tiril, not to treat it as something that's of some interest or a nice to have, it's a must-have. Cultures have this axiomatic relationship with language. It's critical. And so um, if you're going to take something like Kohang R seriously and the accomplishments it has seriously, um, the one thing you shouldn't do is starve it of funds. And so many of the ones I'm familiar with, these people are putting in hours that they're not getting paid for in a lot of cases. They're going well above and beyond what the job description is because they have a passion for the language. But there's only so long that you can depend on that. And there's only so many people who can fit that role. And so um, like a lot of things in life, it comes back to money. What's the what's the funding? What's the commitment? If you're serious about something, the monetary commitment from the government will follow. And I think that's been missing over several governments, not just the the current few, but for probably going back to the 1970s.

Political Platitudes Populism And Pushback

SPEAKER_01 5:15

But people sound serious when they talk about Tadio Māori. Like, are you saying that there's a bit of a PR campaign going on about how important it is? Because you do mention calling it a Tonga and how that can be part of the problem.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Yeah, it well, people are serious about it in the sense the people involved in revitalization are serious about it. The people involved in teaching about it are extremely serious about it. But then you step back and you ask yourself, are the politicians that serious about it? What's their level of commitment to it? And when you start probing that, you realize that there's a disconnect. People are very happy to say, we fully support it, we want a bilingual country and so on. They're very happy to mouth those sort of platitudes. But when it comes time to what's the extent of commitment and how seriously do they understand the situation that the language is in, then you get quite a different perspective on things. And I don't think all politicians necessarily are that supportive of TREO.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

What do you think that might be? Is it just because it's one of these uh topics where the solutions are pretty, probably pretty difficult, aren't they, and would be hard to run on or campaign on?

SPEAKER_02 6:30

I think if we're really blunt about it, some people use Terrell, like they use the treaty, as a mask to shield their racism. And I've I've heard someone say in in in the context of bilingual road signs, they said, this person said, I'm not racist, but I think that English should be. Um whenever someone precedes a statement with with that comment, I'm not racist, but that that has a little sort of alarm bell ringing in my head. And I think, well, why would you say that? So I think there's an element of that. There's an element of populism, there's an element of sort of dog whistle politics. I think certain areas like like today have become a stick with which some politicians beat people with. So there are all these sorts of things that go into the political mix for sure, and that's the nature of populist policies and politics. We may not like it, but it's a fact of life. Um, but I think there are other issues as well, including some of the solutions that are being tried that may not work, um, some of the attitudes towards the language and the places where it's spoken, all these things curdle. And I think we need some clarity and, as I say, enormous, enormous degree more of commitment and of funding.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Okay, so let's go to the book. So, what is the thesis? What did you discover?

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Quite a lot. Um, the

Why Compulsory Classes Often Fail

SPEAKER_02 7:50

first point was that a lot of the strategies that have been employed, um, there there is a risk that they become box-ticking exercises. There's a risk that people put too much faith in certain things and they don't necessarily work. And a a really good example of that is um compulsion. So, should we have compulsory in school? And um, some people say absolutely, because that's going to contribute to language revitalization. Some people say no, it's it denies free will and so on. And there's there's those sort of arguments. But what I decide to do is look at does compulsion work? So the first thing I did is I I thought, well, okay, let's say you're you're doing today one hour a day, three days a week in secondary school for five years in secondary school. Let's say it was compulsory. Would that make you a fluent speaker? And so what I did is I I talked to dozens of people who had done French or German at school for those hours for those years. Um, and this was some decades ago that they'd done that. None of them were fluent in those languages. Um, that that there you go. And that that's the whole point. So one of the problems about compulsion is that. So then I I I cast the net more broadly to see what happens overseas. And Wales is a good example. Um, and I've got the figure here in 1990, Welsh became compulsory, I think up until the age of about 14, then it was extended later on. And the language is in quite serious trouble. I think there was the the um in 2011, there were some figures that came out that said the absolute number of Welsh speakers and the proportion of people in Wales who speak Welsh both were in decline. So that's the concern. Singapore has the mother tongue language policy. They made Tamil compulsory for people who were ethnically Tamil. And as a result, not necessarily as a result of that compulsion, but running alongside it, use of the language dropped among the Tamil community. Um, Ireland is a really good example. Ireland's had had Irish compulsory for over a hundred years in schools, and now the language is in serious trouble. Luxembourg, Luxembourgish, if you're familiar with that, was the compulsory language, still is. Um, I think since the 1930s, it's been a requirement if you want to become a national, national, naturalized member country, you have to speak it. Um, but that's gone into decline too. And the point about all these other examples I've given, apart from Tamil, but if you look at Wales, Ireland, Luxembourg, these are countries where that's the majority culture that is supporting sign language. Not like New Zealand, but New Zealand Terrell faces elements of racism, elements of being in a minority, elements of underfunding, and so on. This is quite different, especially in Wales. You've got a very, a very strong community there that supports it. Absolutely, they support the Welsh language. Um, but it just illustrates that compulsion doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

But but but Paul, uh that makes no sense to me. I mean, well, what's the what what's the reason for that? Because like if Ireland has had compulsion for over a hundred years and it's in decline, in a country where you, you know, in in the home country of the language, what's going on to make that happen? As an educator, what would

Transmission Ecosystems And Extinction Risk

SPEAKER_01 11:05

you say?

SPEAKER_02 11:06

It's very simple. Um, languages survive by well, languages have what what they call a natural transmission mechanism. They transmit, it's almost a biological function in a way. Um, this is why this goes back to Kohanger. The language that you're brought up with as a child is critically important to what you speak as an adult. Um, just as an aside, there's a major survey done by three American universities not so long ago. They found that second language learners, um, so people have learned a second language, um, in almost no cases will they ever transmit that to their children. So they might become very fluent in it. And by the way, this the data set involved, I think there were over 600,000 respondents to this research. So this is a huge data set. And in almost no cases, if you speak a second language, do you transmit that to your child unless that's the majority language of the culture? So there's a couple of things that come into play. One is what's your environment like? And we the best way to illustrate this quickly is to look at an immigrant family. Imagine this family comes from another country which has a different language. Um, a young couple come to New Zealand, they speak that language at home, but they they speak English in public. They have a child, that child speaks the language of their parents, but very quickly through daycare and schools and movies and TV and so on, they acquire English. By the time they're about eight or nine, they have a New Zealand accent. They speak English better than they speak the language of their parents. Um their children will probably still have some or may have some pronunciation of their grandparents' language. The pronunciation will be quite good. They'll know some words, they'll understand a lot more than they can speak. But by their children, third generation, um, the language is largely lost. They're just English speakers. And you can see that with a lot of Maori communities after the Second World War. There's this mass urbanization that took place, and over three generations, the language whittled away in the same way. So that transmechanism, transmission mechanism breaks breaks down. The other thing is that you can see the language environment like an ecosystem. So if a tree falls down in a forest, what happens? There's various saplings there. One of them grows, covers up the canopy, blocks out the light for everyone else. And this is tends to be what happens with languages. One language grows, but it's at the expense of another. And so that's an organic process. Very much so. I mean, it goes back to you can look at the 19th century in New Zealand, that um legislators never actually banned Toreo outright in New Zealand. Because they didn't need to. They had other methods of extinguishing it through through funding and and um other restrictions. But they never put a blanket ban in because they were confident that the forces of linguistic evolution would make some languages extinct. And we actually see that. The UN's very clear. The UN puts out a report on this thing quite regularly, and it's a very tragic report because they list how many of the world's languages have died each year. It's all one-way traffic. It's all one-way traffic. And the other startling thing I came across in this was that there's not one example of an indigenous second language that's been successfully revived.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Not one.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

No, and that ought to be of concern. And this is why I think when I see some people say, oh, everything's working quite well, and you know, the the state of Toreo is great, I I get anxious about that. I think we need to put a lot more effort and attention and funding into it.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

So when they're telling you that it's great, or they're telling other people that it's great, uh uh do they honestly believe that, or is it just are they being optimistic, hoping that it'll change their fortunes? I mean, well, there's there's a bit of both.

SPEAKER_02 14:53

Um I think according to the current or the latest census results that we had, there's there's about 210, 213,000 people in New Zealand who are Toreo speakers. After English, it's the second most spoken language in the country. So, friend and I, he's he's a native speaker of Toreo, by the way. We decided to do an experiment over about 18 months. Very unscientific. But what we did, we went to various markets and night markets

Fluency Claims And The Ceremonial Trap

SPEAKER_02 15:20

around Auckland to listen to the different languages spoken. Um, yeah, and you hear some or in Tongan, Korean, Eastern European languages, Asian languages, and so on. That's to be expected. But in all the places we went to over 18 months, we never once heard people talking conversationally in Tyrell. And that was that was a sort of a wake-up call, I think, that this there's some problems. And another example of that, um, when this book came out, um, the director of a large Maori organization invited me to his organization. And that organization is interesting because I think he said there are around 80% of the staff were fluent Tileo speakers. So it's an outlier to have that. That's astonishing, and it's great. And he gave me a tour of the whole organization. We went through all the rooms, offices, and everything else. And at the end, he said, Well, what do you think? And I said, Well, great, except that all the staff were talking to each other in English. And he he, to his credit, he said, Yes, that's an issue. That's a problem. And so um the claimed fluency, and of course, measuring fluency is enormously difficult, and it's self-reporting. So if I say, you know, Dane, are you good at this? And no one's going to check up on it, you say, Well, yeah, of course I am. I'm pretty good. Yeah, I'd I'd count myself as being good at it. And so there's there's an 10-2 tendency to sort of over-report your fluency.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

I guess fluency was one of those things where, yeah, I mean, you could be It's hard to tell. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:47

Semi-fluent, but calling yourself fluent and Yeah, it's hard. But you want to, and you want to you want to have a positive approach to that. And I understand it.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

But um could be aspirational, could be like like me playing dress uh jackets that are two sizes too small, and and they sit in my uh wardrobe for for five or six years. Probably is myself fluent because I will be my next year.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Yeah. Exactly. I'll fit into it. And there there may be an element of that. I suspect there is. There's there's overseas studies which show that to be the case in other jurisdictions. But on top of that, you've got this situation where you just don't hear it except for, and this is the big concern, formal ceremonial occasions. So if there's an opening, Terra will be spoken at a at a porphyry, um, you listen to all the Phi Cor and and um various other official functions. And there's a real risk that the language becomes a ceremonial language or an institutionalized language in the way that Latin did or in the way that Old Slavonic has become. So millions of people in Eastern Europe and and Russia on Sundays will attend Orthodox churches and they'll hear chants in Old Slavonic. Can't speak it, but they'll listen to it. It's it's a language that's used for ceremony. And that that was one of my biggest concerns is that Tore is being marginalized into that space, whereas the the objective ought to be, if we're serious about the language, that it becomes universal, but it becomes spoken everywhere. So there's that risk. And the other risk, of course, that shows up to some degree in statistics, but not clearly enough, is that who's speaking it? So we talk about New Zealand, but the vast majority of people who claim fluency in Toreo are Maori. So there's a question: how does Toreo jump the cultural or ethnic gap to become a New Zealand language rather than a language of one group of people in New Zealand? Is that a good idea? If it is, how do we achieve it? How do we shift the way people see the language? So this all comes back to how important it is and what what we do about managing these challenges.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Okay, so uh

Hebrew Israel And The Power Of Necessity

SPEAKER_01 18:55

I think I I'm gonna know the answer, but I'm gonna ask anyway. Israel. How did Hebrew become the national language when a lot of people would not have been speaking it pre-Israel? So what talk about what you know about uh the evolution of Evrit or or Hebrew and and what what circumstances were different over there, I guess. And and they were able to do it.

SPEAKER_02 19:25

Post-Second World War Israel is a unique case. You get people coming in from all over Europe, Jews from Ukraine, Russia, um, very few from Germany, obviously, um, but from other parts of Europe and other parts of the world as well. What do you do? You need a language that everyone can communicate, can communicate in. You need a common language, a lingua franca, one that all the people, despite their linguistic backgrounds, can communicate in. There's also the added impetus of coming from the tail end of the Holocaust, there's a real cultural urge to do something that is identity building. It's not just about there's an urgency that's there that's and also it's it's not about just what's convenient, it's about who are we. When a large chunk of us in previous seven or eight years have disappeared, who are we? And so there's absolutely that unique situation of the Holocaust, the unique situation of the convergence of all these different linguistic traditions in one foreign place, foreign to most of these people at the time. Um, everything sort of made sense at that moment in time that Hebrew would be the language that would unite people. And you might think, well, you know, that that could be a model for here. Not really, because those circumstances haven't prevailed anywhere else. And so it wasn't an indigenous second language, it was actually a borrowed first language, if that makes sense, that people adjusted. But if you look at New Zealand in the 1820s, that's an instructive case because as far as I can tell, and I've done a lot of research in this period, the majority of settlers here could speak Tireo. So, you know, this it's a fact that a lot of people don't realize is that the majority of Pakiau in the 1820s New Zealand were reasonably fluent Tireo speakers. Not because it was the right thing to do or something to boast about to others that, you know, you're you're this liberal because you've learnt an indigenous language. It was entirely out of practicality. That they wouldn't have been able to get on with the locals and navigate their lives if they if you want to do things like work or eat, you you need to speak the language of the place that you're in. And maybe, just maybe, there's the seed of something in that fact that necessity can drive it, as it did with the acquisition of Hebrew in Israel. Maybe an element of necessity can drive language acquisition.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

At this point, quite inexplicably,

No Magic Pill What Might Help

SPEAKER_01 21:46

my mic stopped working. Because of that, I'm going to re-record the questions that I asked. So, what are your solutions?

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Well, the first thing is not to have a magic pill, a magic pill that just you take it and it fixes the problem. Because I don't think that exists. This is a really complex issue and area, and it probably requires some structural change. One of the things that occurred to me is, and I don't know if if this is correct or not, but if you look at some of the ideas that are being proposed, so compulsory to on schools, we know that doesn't work on the basis of all the international experience of compulsory language acquisition. And for a couple of reasons, because there's not enough time, because of the environment, so on. If you look at other things, so bilingual signs, bilingual letterheads, and so on. Um, and there's evidence that that doesn't work either. Um, if you look at various other initiatives that being tried, what seems to happen is this we've got initiative A, B, and C and D. None of them work individually, but the hope is, fingers crossed, that if you combine four things that don't work, then together cumulatively, they might work. And I'm not sure about the logic of that. I'd want four things that do work and then make them apply accumulatively.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

What would be your response to people who say, well, something is better than nothing?

SPEAKER_02 23:15

You can do the operation test that the doctor's about to cut open your stomach, and you say, Well, I'm not quite sure what I'm gonna do. We're gonna do something and we're gonna be positive about it. Well, I want a bit more reassurance than that. So I think going back to the question of what to do, well, look at what constitutes a good language speaker. And so much of what constitutes a good language speaker goes back to how people acquire language early on in life. And as I say, the the huge American study which showed that second language speakers, no matter what their proficiency, um, won't pass that on to their kids. So we need people to be first language speakers of a language to have any chance at all. That's the first primary building block. Without that, I don't think it can work. I think the idea of teaching adults to speak Toreo is is helpful, but it's not a solution. Um and we can claim the numbers, we can say there's there's almost a quarter of a million Torah speakers in the country, but outside of formal occasions, where do you hear it? And this is my anxiety. So I think, and and by the way, there are places you do hear it. And surprisingly, and this this is again in my my travels doing intermittent research for this was among young people. And I mean early teens. And I encountered pockets of early teens speaking fluently in Tileo with each other. They'd been to Kuhang and Kura, and that for them was quite normal, but they're critically small in number. And again, it goes back to resources, but that other puzzling question is Tireo just for Maori, or is it for the whole country?

Who Is Te Reo For

SPEAKER_02 24:50

And if it's just for Maori, are we inhibiting it? But if it's for the whole country, are we diluting its cultural status? So these are really imponderables. And it's not for you know me or anyone singularly to decide that, but they're things to be grappled with and contended with rather than say, well, look, we're just gonna do this or that.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Do you think some negative attitudes to non-Maori learning Maori could be holding back the language? I have some sympathy for that.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

Um, because if we treat Tyrell as just a language, as just a means of communication, then sure, everyone should learn it. But it's entwined with so much more. It's entwined with things like cultural identity, with history, with connections with people and place. And so if I, someone like me who's not Maori, if I speak the language fluently, um, yes, that that might be good. But do I actually have those sort of connections, the nexus between language and culture? No, I don't. So what state has that language got for me? Is it a Talma for me in the way it is for someone who is indigenous? So these are these issues to contend with. And again, I I don't know what the answer is, but I think we need to grapple with them because again, it goes back to that primary anxiety that every year that this isn't dealt with, every year that we think things are all rosy, uh I get the sense that language is gradually becoming encased in its ceremonial form. And it's just not used conversation, it's not used when people get together, meet up after work, and speak in Tileo. And that would be the objective. That to me, that would be the ideal, that um, that the government wouldn't have to fund Tarao because it it's spoken automatically, naturally, by large numbers of people. But getting to that point is extraordinarily difficult. And I think if we're really honest, no one actually knows quite how to get there. It's very easy to someone to sit down and say, Well, look, I've I've I've got a degree and I'm I'm an expert and I'm gonna say this is the solution. But none of those seem to have worked so far. And it's not just in New Zealand, it's for indigenous communities around the world.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

What are some of the other barriers, do you think, to the revitalization of Tereo

Pronunciation Gatekeeping And English Dominance

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Maori?

SPEAKER_02 27:06

There's a little bit in the book that um, and this was controversial, um, where I talked about pronunciation. So if if I was to sort of look at policy on this, one of the things I would notice looking at policy is there's a real insistence on correct pronunciation of Tereo. Now, some people try and some people get closer than others, but some people just couldn't care less. And the people who couldn't care less, I think that's just a bit, you know, it's it's poor form on their behalf. It's the the minimum degree of respect you could have for a language is to try to say it as accurately as you can. Um, so correct pronunciation. Then you look at the most successful language in history, which is English. And the one thing you can say about English is that it's it's the most mispronounced language. And and it is. In fact, there's no such thing as a correct pronunciation. And you might think, no, and you might think, well, yeah, what's the most common form of English? Well, that's spoken English spoken in India. Numerically, that's the most common form of English in terms of accents, in terms of pronunciation. Well, some people, I remember raising this with someone, they said, Well, the Queen's English, and I I pointed out some research. Um, the Queen from her first Christmas broadcast to her last changed her own pronunciation. So there is no standard essentially. There is no correct. Um, and so you know, obviously, um we we see this now. I see it with with younger people who have those post-vocalic R's, the hard R, they're talking about a car or something like that, because they're being influenced by American pronunciation in the media. So in English, really, no one polices pronunciation, really. Um we we caricature it, but it's very much organic and evolving, and it it's a it's a sort of a mongrel pronunciation that you know you can pick and choose what suits. That might be a strength. I don't know. I I look at it from the other point of view too, from the person who isn't who is a fluent native speaker, and the ones, a lot of the ones I know, they they share these anxieties I have, by the way. And there's a degree of or a sense of fragility about the state of the language that when something is so fragile, you rush forward and try to help and protect it. English is is muscular and arrogant and invasive. No one's trying to protect English. No one's trying to make sure we save it from something. And that's because it has these traits of a dominant language, and almost in a Nietzschean sense, it expands, as I say, at the expense of other languages. It consumes them. It doesn't exist to survive, it exists to dominate. And so I get it that if you are a speaker of a minority language, you you do sense that fragility, you do sense the threat. And so you you try to put a protective shield over that language, which includes enforcing pronunciation standards that English just doesn't bother with. Now, is there something in that? I don't know, but maybe there is. Maybe the the mongrel nature of English, maybe it's arrogance and it's it's carefree sort of amoral existence that it doesn't adhere to any rules, maybe that's the strength. But then again, you you look at Todo and you you can think, well, imagine if people start mucking around with pronunciation, what's it going to do to it? When Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, there was an account of a ship that left London and um got shipwrecked near Northumberland. And the people in Northumberland helped these people ashore and thought they were foreigners. Because the English was so different between Northumberland and London, they thought it was a foreign language. Now, over the centuries, and particularly since the onset of social media and the internet, there's there's a massive narrowing of pronunciation within England. So all those sort of, even in the 1970s, there were comedies that made fun of people from Yorkshire or Wales or whatever, because Cornwall, because of the funny way they spoke. But you visit those places now, it's it's quite different. There's a much more narrow range. Why? Because there's a lot more intermingling, not necessarily personally, but through social media and through electronic media. And I think that's the case in in all English around the around the world, that we don't go too far to the point we don't understand each other, because then it doesn't serve that primary purpose of communication. So this sort of has a self-regulating, self-monitoring system to keep it within a certain parameter that, yes, there's different pronunciation, sometimes different vocabulary, but it's common enough to function together. And as the world becomes more connected, that commonality means that those parameters narrow slightly and narrow slightly again as we we share the way we talk. So that's what English is doing. And one of the options I proposed was look at what are the ingredients that make English so dominant? How come it's because it's not the easiest of languages to learn. I mean, my mum came here in the 1960s and she she doesn't. I mean, obviously English is a second language for her, and her spelling is atrocious. That's sort of phonetic and and so and um I mean, you know, she's not long for this world. So she um, yeah, she's never going to learn it. Um she's always said it's really difficult to learn. Written the written form anyway. Um, but yet this language is taken out of the world. Now, there's certain historical reasons for it, but the fact of how it operates as a global language now, there's a whole lot of lessons contained in that. And I think if we can extract some of those and maybe apply them to is there something there? Flexibility of pronunciation. Um, the fact that it's a common language for something. So um I was talking to a person who's involved in banking and he attends banking conferences in various parts of Asia with Asian banks. And all the conversations, all the discussions in English, that's the language that they use there. Um in most universities in the Netherlands now, English is a language of instruction. Um I went to, I went to accidentally, just happened to be there, went to a conference of of German and Dutch business people in Amsterdam, and I just walked into the wrong place. You know, and um Dutch and German are really close linguistically, and yet they're all speaking in English to each other, fluent English. So um, and this is one of the other things that that people I think misperceive the dynamic in this country as being one of a dominant Pakhao language and um a struggling indigenous language. Now there are elements of that to be sure. But English is making inroads into places like the Netherlands, Sweden. It's it's it's conquering other first world developed

History Demographics And The Content Gap

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countries.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

How do you respond to people who say that Tideo Māori was quite literally beaten out of school students?

SPEAKER_02 34:02

Well, people were definitely punished for speaking Tideo in schools. Um there's too much evidence and it's too broad to be incidental. Um, people are actually punished for speaking full stop. It's not punished enough. But yeah, um, but that that certainly happened. But I think it it's mistaken to believe that that that had such a bad effect on the language because, you know, um so I know I know lots of people who speak various languages. Now, they never speak it at school at all. They just speak English, but that hasn't meant that they've lost those languages. So the idea that because you're banned from speaking a language at school, suddenly you lose the language, that's an inadequate answer. There were other factors at play. So definitely education was part of it. Um I think there were cultural shifts around the 1860s, late 1860s into the 1870s. Hundreds of Maori parents petitioned the crown to have English as the language of instruction in their schools. Because they wanted their kids to prosper in this new world as they saw it. And so they did what all good parents do and thought, what gives our kids an advantage? And they they thought we want English taught that. Funny enough, at the same time, you have some Pacquiao missionaries insisting that only Tereo is taught in classes. So it was a bit of an odd time. Um, but even that doesn't affect the language. What really affects it is when you have this tidal wave of people coming in speaking another language. It's purely numerical. If you look at the end of the 19th century and Maori populations, what, 5-6% of the total population, and the rest is speaking English, well, no matter what measures anyone does, or what the government does, or what people, you know, teachers do, whatever, you know what the outcome of that's going to be. That's that's predictable. So demographics plays a part of it, but it doesn't anymore, I don't think, to the same extent because of the global dominance of English. We're not talking about a New Zealand problem, we're talking about a global challenge at the moment. And if you look at the entertainment, so look at teenagers, look at the entertainment that they consume. Firstly, it's on a phone or a device or a laptop or whatever. Um, if you look at music, movies, whatever else, TikTok, anything, how much of that content is in Tyrell? And you're talking about a tiny, tiny fragment of 1%, maybe if you're lucky. So just the available content isn't there. Um, so if if I was, if I had been to a Kohanger and a Kura and I was 16 years old, and I'm really keen about my language, everywhere I turn, the doors close in terms of opportunities to have experiences in that movies, music, music to some extent, but not much. But you know, popular culture is English culture, and that's it's a global thing. So again, this might be a resource thing as well. What what if we're serious about protecting this, would we do would we produce more content that people consume? And would people consume it? That's the other problem.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

My son learned German basically watching children's films on the German setting. He's now semi-fluent. So there is a way, isn't there?

SPEAKER_02 37:06

Um, if when he has children, I suspect those children won't be German speakers. They won't pick that up necessarily from him. It's unlikely, highly unlikely. The second point is that um if they do, it won't be necessarily the sort of popular colloquial type of language that's spoken in Germany, but it might be sort of a more that's the second point. The third point, which you made, which is really crucial, he's got somewhere to go to where it's the majority language to get fluent within a few months. If you're if you're if you're learning today or New Zealand, where do you go that it's the majority language like that? You don't. I mean, there are well, there are players, yeah, but even there, what are people consuming on on for leisure? What content are they consuming? And this this is the problem. So you see, we've got this this challenge. The other thing I think is a problem of perception.

The Burning Marae Metaphor And Final Plea

SPEAKER_02 37:56

Um, I actually used this example to a group last year. I said, imagine you know, there's a group of you in the car and you're driving along a country road and you see a Marai on the farm, on a piece of land there, and you notice that one of the walls of that Marai is on fire. What do you do? Well, different people in the car might have different views. One person might say, our Mariah have always survived. There's nothing to worry about. Let's just keep driving. Nothing can threaten them. Someone else might say, Well, yes, that wall might be in trouble, but the other walls look fine, so I don't think there's much to worry about. And the third person might say, if that Marai burns down, we never get it back. And I think that that summarizes in a way different attitudes towards today. Or some people think it's always been there, there's nothing to worry about. Some say, yeah, but we've got some challenges, but we're making progress. I'm in the third camp. I'm my anxiety is that if we reach a critical point of non-native speakers, all the evidence is that we're in trouble. And we we've got to somehow put the handbrakes on before we get to that point and go out and rescue it. And if if it sounds doom and gloom and if people think it's controversial, so be it. But you know, there are bigger things at stake than than you know who's right or wrong in this about making protecting something and making that language, giving that language some sort of chance.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

Thank

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SPEAKER_00 39:20

you for listening to Free2Speak. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider sharing the podcast with others. We release new episodes regularly, and subscribing is the easiest way to stay up to date. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, you can contact us at podcast at fsu.nz. If you want to find out more about the New Zealand Free Speech Union, visit fsu.nz.