[RNLD] Fwd: Language nests in NZ

Ghil'ad Zuckermann ghilad.zuckermann at ADELAIDE.EDU.AU
Wed Sep 10 08:11:39 UTC 2014


Dear Nick and Petra,


Here is one relevant article:


Spolsky, Bernard. (2003). Reassessing Maori regeneration. Language in Society, 32, 4, 553-578.

Reassessing Māori regeneration

BERNARD SPOLSKY

Bar-Ilan University

52900 Ramat-Gan, Israel

spolsb at mail.biu.ac.il<mailto:spolsb at mail.biu.ac.il>

Māori


abstract

After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, theMāori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers. (Language policy, language practice, language ideology, language management, New Zealand, Maori, regeneration, revitalization, amalgamation, accommodation)*


introduction: a language policy framework

Scholarly interest in language loss and maintenance (Fishman 1964) has grown into an almost frantic concern over the endangerment of the majority of the world’s 6,000 or so languages (Hale 1991; Krauss 1991, 1998), a situation that has given special urgency to the study of language policy. The Māori1 language in New Zealand has a special place on the list of languages marked by strong efforts at what Fishman 1990, 1991, 2001 has labeled “reversing language shift” – efforts by an ethnic group or government to revive or maintain their language. For Māori, three decades of grassroots-inspired efforts at maintenance or revival, with reluctant recent support from the government, have attempted to make up for the gradual loss of the language over a century of contact with colonizing English.

In this article, I will look at the process, using as a framework for analysis a model of language policy (Spolsky & Shohamy 2000b) that eschews a purely linguacentric approach. I will interpret it not as colonial language destruction followed by postmodern rescue efforts, but rather as a continuation of a course of action that started two centuries ago, when the autochthonous inhabitants (tangata whenua) of New Zealand (Aotearoa)and the European settlers began to negotiate an accommodation with each other, politically, socially, economically, culturally, and linguistically. The question of success or failure of Māori language policy in New Zealand, central to this study, cannot be restricted to linguistic issues alone.

The language policy of a social group2 may belocated in three interrelated but not necessarily consistent components: language practice, language ideology, and language management. Language practice comprises all the consensual choices of languages or language forms making up what Hymes 1974 called “ethnography of speaking.” In the present case, the relevant language practice is the choice of Māori or English, or some mixture of the two,3 by various New Zealanders in various situations and for various purposes. Language ideology includes the beliefs of the members of the various social groups about language and language use (Woolard 1998), including attitudes4 to the languages and to the items5 that identify the languages and varieties used in the community.6 The third component islanguage management,7 defined as any effort by an individual or institution that holds or claims authority to modify the language practice or language ideology of other people. Language management decisions are policies, and they may be expressed in laws or regulations, and may be implemented or not.

Language policies may focus on different linguistic levels. It is language management when an individual teacher attempts to prevent a child from mixing Māoriwords into English speech, just as much as when theMāori Language Commissioner sets a goal to have 40% of New Zealanders speak Māori. The interrelationship of management with practice and ideology is the most problematic issue in language policy. How effective can management be in changing practice or ideology? Can language management compete with nonlinguistic social and political and economic forces? Indeed, can language (any more than, say, economics) be managed at all? One question I address here will be: What effect, if any, has recent language management had on Māori language practices and ideology?

Language policy is not a closed system but rather one aspect of the practices, behaviors, ideologies, and policies of a social group. Bourdieu stressed the wider context: “Those who seek to defend a threatened language ... are obliged to wage a total struggle. One cannot save the value of competence unless one saves the market, in other words the whole set of political and social conditions of production of the producers/consumers” (1991:57). In the most obvious cases, changes in demography (such as the arrival of large numbers of immigrants or the emigration of a section of the community) or political independence (such as the major changes that followed the granting of autonomy to former colonial territories in the 1960s or to the countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1980s) can be assumed to lead to changes in language practice, ideology, and management.

To be able to ask about the success or failure ofMāori language revival, we need to attempt to desynonymize a number of terms often used interchangeably. The most common of these is revive, used to refer to any restoration of earlier vigor in a language. It carries with it an implication that before revival the language was “dead,” but in most cases, this turns out not to be true. In the case of the revival of Irish and Māori, for instance, there were still native speakers alive when the revival movement started; in the case of Hebrew, while there were no native speakers, there had been active second-language learning and literary use during the centuries that the language was not spoken (Spolsky & Shohamy 2000a). The current MāoriLanguage Commissioner (Hohepa 2000) uses the termregeneration, which seems to be a useful way to refer to the increase of salience and status that comes when a language becomes a focus for ethnic mobilization.

Fishman 1991, 2001 has coined the phrasereversing language shift to denote efforts to assist speech communities “whose native languages are threatened because their intergenerational continuity is proceeding negatively, with fewer and fewer users (speakers, readers, writers, and even understanders) every generation” (1991:1). Although his model includes a number of other critical stages and steps, he holds that the restoration of natural intergenerational transmission is a key factor. The term I use for this stage (Spolsky 1989, 1991) is revitalization, derived from Stewart’s and Fishman’s definitions of vitality as referring to parents using a language to raise their children.8

Management activities of reversing language shift very rarely lead to revitalization. Hebrew is the exception (Fishman 1991, Spolsky 1995). In other cases, even though a result may be increase in knowledge of the language (as with Irish; O Laoire 1996) or in its use (as with Catalan; Strubell 2001; or French in Québec; Bourhis, 2001), most studies agree with the comment of Hornberger & King 2001 about Quechua, that the reattainment of intergenerational transmission is“difficult and unlikely.” Given that the evidence so far shows that Māori is not an exception like Hebrew, the question arises of how to measure success in language regeneration.

There is no need to rehearse the full story of Māori“lost and regained.” A clear account of Māori language loss is given by Benton 1981), whose survey (Benton 1991) in the 1970s drew attention to the serious state of the language. Benton & Benton 2001 bring the narrative up to date by reviewing the steps taken with the goal of stopping language shift over the past decade. At first glance, it seems not unreasonable to interpret the observable facts in popular postcolonial terms, with all the normal villains (missionaries and settlers) and victims (native peoples and their languages). In this essay, however, I wish to argue for an alternative reading that sees the process as the continued effort of two groups of people sharing common space, each taking an active role in negotiating the way in which that sharing should be instantiated as regards language choice.

literacy and loss

English introduced by European contact

In the early encounters between Europeans and Māori, the newcomers were the ones who accommodated. The first communication between speakers of Māori and speakers of English took place when Captain Cook circumnavigated New Zealand in the years 1769–1770 (Salmond 1991). In that first meeting, it was theEuropeans who made an effort to learn Māori, a situation that continued for some time (Maori Language Commission 1996:4). The missionaries who came or were brought to New Zealand after 1820 generally learned Māori and used it in the schools they set up. Belich 1996 highlights the symbiotic relationship by showing that early missionaries were sponsored by localMāori chiefs, who treated them virtually as vassals.

In spite of their early support for the Māorilanguage, it was the missionary schools that in time brought English to the Māori.9 Literacy in Māori came first.10 Contemporary accounts note the speed with whichMāori learned to read, so that the missionaries had to work hard to fill the demand for reading matter, printing large quantities of religious material in the language.11About half of adult Māori were assumed to be able to read their own language by the late 1850s, and a third to write it. Literacy was becoming indigenized,12 as witness the large number of letters preserved, or the recording of traditional knowledge noted by Best 1923. But the ultimate effect of literacy was to open up the Māori to Western ideas and values, starting with the variety of Victorian Protestant Christianity promulgated by the missionaries. Gaining control of the new technique came with a high price.

Within a few years of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi13 in 1840, on the basis of which the British Crown claimed sovereignty over New Zealand, the New Zealand government started to support the mission schools,14 implementing a government policy of civilizing and pacifying the Māori.15 Tension was growing between European settlers and Māori over the formers’ efforts16 to take over the latters’ land, which led finally to the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s (Belich 1986).

Both government and Māori actively supported education and the learning of English, but, according to Simon 1998, for different reasons. The government’s aim, generally, was to replace Māori language and culture with English. The Māori, on the other hand, who provided land and money for the mission schools, wanted to obtain English knowledge as a tool for dealing with the government and the new settlers. Each party then had its own motivation. Just as there were differences of opinion about the meaning of land sales, so there were differences in the understanding of the role of education. Looked at in the full perspective of 200 years of contact, these conflicting views have been the topic of continued negotiation and accommodation.

The mission schools did not just teach Christianity and Māori literacy; they also tried to “civilize” theMāori, teaching skills that would fit them into the desirable colonial role of servants and manual laborers. Government support was dependent on their teaching English and was premised on the notions of theinferiority of Māori language and culture. But until 1860, Belich 1996 believes, the two peoples were starting to form “one harmonious community,” to use the words of the governor in 1852. Economic interaction flourished, and a large proportion of Māori were being converted to one form or another of Christianity. Through all this, Belich argues, the Māori community maintained its autonomy and believed it was gaining as much as it was paying.

The peace collapsed about 1860, destroyed by disputes over land and a new government’s desire to assert full control. The British started military actions in 1860, and for the next decade and more, some 18,000 British troops were engaged in operations against 60,000Māori men, women, and children (Belich 1986:15), ending with a delayed and limited but final victory for the European settlers.17

In 1867, the mission school system having been weakened by the wars, the government passed the Native Schools Act (Simon 1998), intended to establish Māorivillage schools that would teach through the medium of English.18 The Act took nearly a century to have its full effect, but it was the major step in the shift of Māorispeakers from Māori monolingualism, through an intermediate stage of bilingualism, to English monolingualism. Its dual goals were the benefits of education and “civilization” for the natives, and equally important, the economic benefits of pacifying them and avoiding the expense of future wars. By 1879, 57 Native Schools had been established, 19 mainly in the far northern and eastern parts of the North Island, areas not directly affected by the recent wars.20

It is a mistake, I suggest, to treat this as a one-way colonial policy, for there was a wide range of Māoriattitudes to these schools and their policies. At one extreme were the rejectionists or separatists, who hoped to maintain Māori autonomy and identity. The other extreme might be represented by one community21 that wanted Māori banned in its schools. Along the continuum in between were those communities and individuals who wanted English added but did not think it should replace Māori. Benton (1981:54) claims that Sir Apirana Ngata, one of the most influential advocates in the 1930s for learning English, believed that “the best equipped Māori today is bilingual and bicultural.” Simon (1998:12) suggests that Māori who supported English schooling saw it as adding a skill needed “to enable our descendants to cope with the Europeans.”

These three positions, which might be namedassimilationist, amalgamationist,22 and separatist, remain useful today as categorizing competing views of the nature of New Zealand identity. A common non-Māori attitude, accepted also by many individuals ofMāori descent, favors complete assimilation.23 A second non-Māori view, held also by many Māori,24 is that New Zealand identity can best be achieved by amalgamation (Ward 1995) of the peoples and the development of a single blended and merged population, with appropriate adoption of some aspects of Māori culture and language by the non-Māori majority. The third, separatist view assumes that Māori and non-Māori can live side by side with equal rights but with distinct social and cultural institutions and languages.25

The assimilationist view clearly has no problem with the loss of Māori language. They blame any conflict on a small group responsible for making Māoridissatisfied with their position in the New Zealand society (Nairn & McCreanor 1991). The amalgamationists would like non-Māori as well as Māorito learn the language. Some non-Māori who learned the language well resented being treated as outsiders byMāori communities. The separatists are those who insist on the revitalization of Māori as the living language of the Māori community, ideally a Māori that reestablishes the appropriate dialect for each iwi ‘tribe’. Although there are variations in degree of separatism, it is the separatists who generally played important roles in the language revitalization movement. These three views and themes appear regularly in the history of Māori contacts with non-Māori, providing a perspective that will help us recognize and understand the points of view of bothMāori and non-Māori  in two centuries of negotiation..

When the Education Act of 1877 established national free and compulsory secular schooling, some of the Native Schools transferred to the new system. Those that remained came under the Organizing Inspector of Native Schools, the first of whom, James Pope, established the Native Schools Code of 1880, Article II of which set out an assimilationist language policy:

It is not necessary that teachers should, at the time of their appointment, be acquainted with the Maori tongue. In all cases English is to be used by the teacher when he is instructing the senior classes. In the junior classes the Maori language may be used for the purpose of making the children acquainted with the meaning of English words and sentences. The aim of the teacher, however, should be to dispense with the use of Maori as soon as possible. (New Zealand General Assembly 1880)

Pope’s successor in 1903, William Bird, saw no reason to wait at all and imposed a ban on the use of Māori in school in order to implement the Direct Method that was popular for the teaching of foreign languages at the turn of the century (New Zealand Department of Education 1917).

The Native Schools and their assimilationist language policies were a major factor in the development of bilingualism and the growing status of English. Māoriwas permitted back into the school curriculum only in 1909.26 School policies and practices were in fact far from uniform: There were teachers who believed in teaching English through Māori, others who permittedMāori in the playground but not the classroom, and others who punished pupils for using Māori words in the school grounds. The Native Schools created a new and English-dominated domain built in the very heart ofMāori village life. Initiated by the colonizing and civilizing government, but also accepted and supported by a growing proportion of assimilating or amalgamatingMāori leaders, these schools created “modern” English-speaking space and certainly played a major part in the eventual process of language loss.

Māori remained the language of the community for the first decades of colonization, but slowly, changes in the demographic balance, in the pattern of settlement, and in the process of acculturation led to its attrition. Writing in 1949, Sir Peter Buck (1958) noted the revolutionary changes that had taken place within theMāori language, so that many old words were no longer known or used, and even the best interpreters were having difficulty. English borrowings were also changing the language out of recognition. Buck saw not just language change but also language loss.27 Twenty years later, Metge 1967 observed widespread Māori-English bilingualism. Because English was the language that they must use in daily life outside the Māori community, she believed that virtually all Māori spoke enough English to get by.28

Summing up in terms of the language policy framework, the changed political and demographic situation had led to a change in language practice, withincreasing use of English both inside and outside the Maori community. This was reinforced by government-imposed educational management with its commitment to monolingual English education. Some ideological support for the value of the Māori language continued within the Māori community, but lacking support in language management activities – particularly policies for teaching the language to Māori children – language practice was moving rapidly in the direction of English.

Nonlinguistic factors were critical. Density of population was one. By the end of the twentieth century, the Māori population was concentrated in the North Island, with more than half living in Auckland, Waikato, or the Bay of Plenty. Outside these areas, language maintenance was much more difficult. A second demographic factor was the movement from rural to urban areas after World War II; in 1945, one-quarter lived in urban areas, but by the 1970s, only one-quarter remained in rural areas. The greater likelihood of mixing with English speakers in the towns obviously led to more rapid language loss. In addition, Māori continued to constitute a socio-economically disadvantaged group.29They tended to be employed in occupations with lower median incomes, to earn less than non-Māori with similar qualifications, to be more seriously affected by unemployment, and in spite of recent improvements, to have lower educational qualifications.

The loss of Māori was confirmed by Benton 1981, who, between 1973 and 1978, conducted a survey of the knowledge and use of the language. He estimated that there remained about 70,000 native speakers in New Zealand, with about 115,000 people able to understand the spoken language. Fluent speakers were a minority even within the Māori population: As late as 1953, just over half of the children in Māori schools had been said to speak the language, and another quarter to understand it. Benton found that, by the 1970s, English was rapidly replacing Māori. In most North Island communities, a majority of Māori adults could still speak and understand the language, but even in areas where Māori were a majority, English tended to be the language of the home, particularly with and among children. The assimilationists, it seems, were winning, and language was losing its place in Māori ethnic identity.



resisting language loss

About 20 years after Benton’s survey a 1995 survey30found that nearly 60% of Māori adults spoke someMāori, but the majority (83%) either had low fluency or did not speak it. English was the main language spoken in nearly 80% of Māori homes. Māori was most commonly heard on the marae ‘ceremonial space in aMāori community’ or at hui ‘Māori meetings or assemblies’. In the 1996 New Zealand Census,31 a total of 523,371 New Zealand residents identified themselves as ethnically Māori, making up 15% of the nation’s total resident population. Of those, 25% said they could converse in Māori. The age profile of Māori able to converse in Māori showed that it was people over the age of 55 or under the age of 15 who were most likely to know Māori. Even though the absence of middle-aged speakers of the language was evidence of  the loss found by Benton, the large number of speakers under age 15 showed a major reversal. It is this phenomenon that we next attempt to explain.

Language (re)acquisition policies

By the time that Benton conducted his survey in the 1970s, the Māori language was on the way to the lowest stage on Fishman’s (1991) “Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale”, in which the “vestigial” users of the language are socially isolated (Benton & Benton 2001). Two decades later, the situation had changed.

Where did the impetus for regeneration come from? Although there were local causes and colorations,32 a spurt of concern for ethnic identity was a worldwide phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s (Fishman et al. 1985). The political activities that led to the setting up of the Waitangi Tribunal started earlier, but the major language revival activities appear to date from the end of the 1970s. A Māori group, Nga Tamatoa, wasinstrumental in raising the consciousness of the Māoricommunity by lobbying for the language to be taught inschools. As a result, there developed four major interconnected sets of management activities in the area that Cooper 1989 labels “language acquisition policy,”aimed to teach Māori to nonspeakers.

Adult relearning of Māori.

The first was the effort made by adult Māori to learn their language. A handful of young people started to learn Māori at university or training college.33 Because only a minority of Māori attended university or teachers’college, the gap in adult learning needed to be filled by a grassroots movement. In 1980, one of the founders of the Te Ataarangi movement, Mataira 1980, proposed the use of a foreign-language teaching method34 that was currently in vogue in the United States. Apart from a small seed grant at the beginning, the movement has continued independently to teach Māori to an unknown number of adults. Its methodology has been adopted by some educational institutions, especially wānanga.35Many leaders of the language movement learned Māoriin these programs.

Mokopuna “grandchildren.”

A second initiative, starting a year or two later, was Kōhanga Reo, a program intended originally to pass language proficiency from Māori-speaking grandparents to their grandchildren (N. Benton 1989, King 2001). Much better known internationally than Te Ataarangi, TeKōhanga Reo has revolutionized language revival programs and has adherents in many parts of the world.36The idea of a preschool start was mooted at a conference in 1980. Two years later, the first Kōhanga Reo was opened at Pukeatua near Wellington, and by the end of the year there were about 50 similar programs throughout New Zealand. Kōhanga Reo were set up in church buildings, on marae, in empty classrooms, or in private homes. The movement spread rapidly: by the end of 1983, there were 148 Kōhanga Reo, each with 20 to 40 pupils; the following year there were 240, in 1985 326<tel:1985%20326>, and in 1988 520<tel:1988%20520>, reaching 819 by 1994.

Outside the direct control of the Ministry of Education, Kōhanga Reo were supported by funds provided to a trust through Te Puni Kōkiri, the Ministry of Māori Development. Individual Kōhanga Reo are run by the parents. Over the years, national programs have been developed and efforts have been made to develop teacher training. Initially, the model was simple: Māori-speaking grandparents came together to look after and teach Māori to their own grandchildren, who were otherwise brought up by English-speaking parents. MostKōhanga Reo were small, and many were successful in developing Māori language fluency.

Kura Kaupapa Māori.

The third initiative, an outgrowth of the Kōhanga Reo movement and an expression of dissatisfaction with the slow provision of bilingual education in the regular school system, was the Kura Kaupapa Māori independent school movement. At age 5, the Māori-speaking graduates of Kōhanga Reo were ready to go to elementary school. Occasionally, this challenge was met by the establishment of bilingual classes at public schools (see below), but when this did not happen, some communities took their own initiative. The first Māoriimmersion primary school was opened in 1985 on Hoani Waititi marae near Auckland. Another school, the first to use the name Kura Kaupapa Māori, was established in 1987 by the parents of children graduating from twoKōhanga Reo in Auckland (Smith 1997). A third opened the following year and two more in 1990. To start with, these Māori grassroots schools were outside the formal state system, but the 1989 Education Amendment Act made it possible for Kura Kaupapa Māori to be an option37 within the system (Smith 1997). By June 1995, there were 38 state-funded Kura Kaupapa Māori, authorized under the Education Act of 1989, Section 155, which allowed for the designation of schools where the parents of at least 21 pupils wanted a school with Māorias the principal language of instruction. In 1997, the Ministry of Education reported that there were 54 kura, with about 3,700 pupils involved. Four were designated as wharekura, schools with secondary programs.

These three grassroots language acquisition initiatives at the adult, preschool, and elementary school level have no doubt been the major component of theMāori resistance to language loss. Their effects are showing signs of going beyond the classroom. Two-thirds of Māori adults with children under age 15 in school said their children were learning Māori, and most were satisfied with the outcome: the more they werelearning, the more satisfaction was expressed (Statistics New Zealand, 2001). One out of five said that they had helped or worked in a Kohanga Reo or a Kura KaupapaMāori in the past year. This constitutes a clear swing in the direction of separatism, especially in parents’reluctance to permit English in the school. At the same time, the fact that the programs do not generally continue to the high school level (see next section) suggests a much more accommodating position.

State schools.

Providing further support for the notion of negotiation, in parallel with these Māori initiatives, the Ministry of Education has been responding to community pressures to support Māori language teaching. The Māori language and culture was permitted back into the schools as early as the 1920s. Māori became a university entrance examination subject then, but was not actively taught until 20 years later. The state school interest in Māoriculture reached its climax in the 1980s, with the addition of Taha Māori as a school program, intended to teachMāori culture to both Māori and non-Māori students, the paradigmatic example of the ideology of amalgamation.

After the establishment in 1978 of the first bilingual school at Ruatoki, the New Zealand Department of Education started to make provision for Māori bilingual education in some regular primary schools. Spolsky 1989 described the characteristics of the programs that developed. There were no curriculum materials available, and the Māori-speaking inspectors and advisers were too busy helping mainstream schools with the new TahaMāori programs to give much help to the immersion classes. The teachers tended to be highly experienced early childhood experts who had never used their nativeMāori in the school context. Assisted sometimes byMāori-speaking aides and often by elderly relatives, theyset up their classrooms as closed Māori space in which only Māori was spoken. Though officially called“bilingual” programs, many of them were in fact immersion programs.

Bilingual and immersion Māori-medium programs have continued to exist in the state system. As a general rule, they are individual classrooms within a regular school, intended to provide continuation for KōhangaReo graduates. Their existence attests to a major change in the general language policy of New Zealand education. Māori is now recognized as a school language, and when the new national curriculum for mathematics was published, a Māori version was also prepared. Similarly, the new national curriculum for English was paralleled with the national curriculum forMāori.

As a result of this change of policy, by 1992 more than 16,000 Māori children were receiving some form ofMāori-medium instruction in state or Māori schools. In 1997, there were 54 Kura Kaupapa Māori, 11 other immersion schools, 86 bilingual schools, 115 immersion classes, and 220 bilingual classes (Benton & Benton 2001). In 1998, there were more than 27,000 Māoristudents in these classes, and there were in addition nearly 5,000 non-Māori students in the lower levelMāori-medium classes. These classes were spread over 472 schools. In 20 years, then, there had been a revolutionary change in education policy.

These changes, however, are so far mainly restricted to elementary schools; only a few Kura Kaupapa Māoriinclude secondary programs. According to Te Puni Kokiri 2001, during the years 1993–1998, there was an actual decrease in the number of secondary students choosing to study Māori, and significant attrition among those who did choose it.38

The Inventory of Māori Language Services (Te Puni Kokiri 2000) lists a large number of government-supported educational activities: grants to establish Early Childhood Centers, subsidies to Kōhanga reo, funds for Kura Kaupapa Māori, inservice training for Māori-medium teachers, preservice training for bilingual teachers, salary allowances for Māori-medium teachers, as well as funds for curriculum material, language learning material, and assessment. But there is still no general Māori language strategy as called for in the 1999 Guidelines discussed in the next section (Te Puni Kokiri 1999b),  something no doubt explained by the absence of consensus on what plan would be acceptable to all elements. The first object in the government Māorilanguage strategy discussed below –increasing the number of speakers by providing more learning opportunities – seems simple enough, until one asks some harder questions. Does this mean “fluent speakers”able to function in all domains? If so, none of the many programs in place has made even a beginning. If, instead, it means only increasing the number of students who have studied Māori in school and have some limited acquaintance with it, like the knowledge of a foreign language usually acquired in a school system, then it seems a somewhat unsatisfying goal for such a major enterprise. Keegan 1997 is doubtful about the levels of proficiency attained in the school programs, and the Te Hoe Nuku Roa baseline study found that only 50% of the children in their study participated in programs, and only 12% could converse in Māori; few had reached advanced proficiency.

>From grassroots pressure to government policy

The four language acquisition management activities described so far have, in the main, been grassroots initiatives or the result of community pressure on the Ministry of Education. At the same time, there has finally been success in persuading the New Zealand government to adopt a wider Māori language policy.

New Zealand, like many other English-speaking countries, has managed to avoid proclaiming an explicit language policy. In the nineteenth century, during the early years of contact, it appears to have been accepted that Māori and non-Māori would each learn the other’s language, but starting in the 1870s, school language policy worked actively to teach English and suppressMāori. During the twentieth century, it was assumed that minority groups, whether autochthonous or immigrant, must somehow do their best to develop control of the national language. The change started in the mid-1970s as a result of Māori initiative and with minimal government support. It represented not national policy, but efforts by interest groups to circumvent or influence government policy.

By 1990, however, two decades of Māori pressure were starting to pay off, and a national Māori language policy was emerging.39 Matthews 1999 cites two critical steps in the 1970s: the petition organized by Nga Tamatoa, a radical youth movement, and submitted to the government signed by 30,000 people in 1973 asking for a better Māori language policy; and the Tū Tangata movement for Māori self-sufficiency in the late 1970s. The grassroots programs for teaching Māori were not justpractical steps but also played an important role in preparing the ground for government recognition.

The decisive breakthrough in government recognition came as a result of the success of the claim to the Waitangi Tribunal by a Wellington-based Māoriorganization, Te Kaiwhakapūmau i Te Reo Māori, that the New Zealand government had failed to protect theMāori language and that this failure was a breach of a promise made in the Treaty of Waitangi. The tribunal (Waitangi Tribunal 1986) found that the treaty did include such a promise, which had not been kept: “The‘guarantee’ in the Treaty requires affirmative action to protect and sustain the language, not a passive obligation to tolerate its existence and certainly not the right to deny its use in any place.”

Since its establishment in 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal has had a major influence on the status of theMāori people in New Zealand. Starting in the late 1980s, the tribunal has issued a number of important judgments dealing with claims for compensation for government lands and forests, commercial fishing rights, the safeguarding of Māori interests in environmental management, and equal opportunity for Māori in public employment. Language, it is important to note, is only one of the topics that have been affected by decisions of the tribunal.

In 1987, in compliance with the tribunal’s decision on the Māori language, the Māori Language Act 1987 became law. The purpose of the act was “to declare theMāori language to be an official language of New Zealand.” The first substantive section of the act recognized a right for anyone to speak Māori in legal proceedings, calling for an interpreter to be available whenever reasonable notice had been given. The second substantive part of the 1987 act established a MāoriLanguage Commission, which was to be named Te Komihana MōTe Reo Māori.40 The commission was to advise on the implementation of policies and practices to give effect to official status, to promote the Māorilanguage “and, in particular, its use as a living language and as an ordinary means of communication,” to issue certificates of competency in the Māori language; and to advise the minister on any matter related to the Māorilanguage.

By passing the Māori Language Act, New Zealand had adopted a two-part Māori language policy. The first part allows for the symbolic use of the language in law courts, and the other establishes a government institution to encourage the use of the language. Implementation of these first two steps was slow but steady.41

To start with, the Māori Language Commission seems to have envisaged its role as something like that of language academies in countries with a strong national standard language, such as France or Spain (Te Puni Kokiri 1998g). It wanted to defend the purity of standardMāori, dealing with issues of terminological innovation and grammatical correctness.42 Towards the end of its first decade, it drafted a Māori Language Strategic Plan (Matthews 1999). The document started with a vision statement: “By the year 2011, the Māori language will have been significantly revitalized as a dynamic feature of everyday life. This will involve sustained increases in both the number of people who speak Māori, and its level of use.” Four key outcomes were envisioned: Māoriwas to be the principal language of a significant number of people in Māori domains; it would be spoken by different generations in Māori homes and communities in everyday life; it would be accepted also in non-Māoridomains; and the general public would have positive attitudes toward it. Like the earlier New Zealand language policy report (Waite 1992), though, this was a somewhat academic document with little or no attention to bureaucratic implementation. It reads more like a philosophy for Māori language policy than a management document.

Te Puni Kōkiri subsequently took a more bureaucratic but realistic approach to a Māori language policy or strategy,43 releasing a series of short policy papers starting in June 1997. The first (Te Puni Kokiri 1997c) set out the legal obligations of the government toward the Māori language, showing their basis in the Treaty of Waitangi, in subsequent decisions of the Waitangi Tribunal and other courts, and in other legislation with implications for language policy, such as the Māori Language Act of 1989, the Education Act of 1989, the Broadcasting Act of 1989, and the Bill of Rights Act of 1990. It cited also two international documents, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Two policy papers described language planning (Te Puni Kokiri 1997a, 1997b). These papers and other lobbying paid off, and on September 8, 1997, the cabinet agreed  “that the Crown and Māori are under a duty derived from the Treaty of Waitangi to take all reasonable steps to actively enable the survival ofMāori as a living language” (Matthews 1999:7). In December 1997, the New Zealand government agreed to five Māori language policy objectives: to increase the number of Māori speakers by increasing opportunities to learn the language; to improve the level of Māoriproficiency; to increase opportunities to use Māori; to develop the Māori language for the full range of modern activities; and to foster positive attitudes so thatMāori/English bilingualism “becomes a valued part of New Zealand society” (Te Puni Kokiri 1999b).

Te Puni Kōkiri was designated by the cabinet to lead an “officials group” from other government departments to implement the policy. A series of internal policy papers was prepared over the next year. Te PuniKōkiri 1998b summarized a paper written for the New Zealand Treasury (Grin & Vaillancourt 1998) that described language management for Basque and Welsh. Other position papers described a Galway (Ireland) federation of state and nonstate organizations working for the promotion of Irish (Te Puni Kokiri 1998a),  discussed evaluation (Te Puni Kokiri 1998d), described the work of language academies and the issue of certifying language competence (Te Puni Kokiri 1998c), set out objectives for the public and private sectors in providing services in Māori (Te Puni Kokiri 1998f), and laid down the tasks for modernizing Māori (Te Puni Kokiri 1998e). The final paper in the series, appropriately titled Te Reo Māori (Te Puni Kokiri 1998h), provided a historical review of the loss of Māoriand a description of revitalization efforts up the 1990s.

In 1999, the strategy went public, with the publication of guidelines (Te Puni Kokiri 1999a, 1999b) addressed to Public Service departments and  to nongovernmental organizations. Government departments were instructed and nongovernmental organizations were encouraged to assist with the revitalization of the Māori language. Each publication listed general objectives and “key aspects” of implementation: a Māori Language Education Plan;Māori language broadcast media; guidelines to assist public service departments (or, in the appropriate version, organizations) to develop their own policies and plans; Māori language corpus activities; and appropriate“mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating Māorilanguage activities.” The guidelines encouraged each department to develop its own Māori language policy statement. The implementation of these policies was expected to take three or four years. A further position paper (Te Puni Kokiri 1999c) described the management efforts for French in Québec and for Frisian in Frysl?n, noting that the Québec linguistic organization had a staff of more than 230 to handle a much larger population, and the Frisian (with approximately the same number of speakers as Māori) managed with about 64, while New Zealand had only 9 people staffing Te Taura Whiri, theMāori Language Commission.

The 1999 national budget allocated funds to Te PuniKōkiri to contract with Statistics New Zealand to conduct a survey of the health of the Māori language by interviewing in depth a sample of Māori. Te Puni Kōkiriin June 2000 published its inventory of Māori language services in 35 government agencies. By the end of the 1990s, then, a handful of professionally sophisticated policy-makers, with a good understanding of language planning processes, had begun a bureaucratic campaign to shape the design, implementation, and evaluation of New Zealand’s Māori language policy. It is too early to assess the results, but the important thing to note is that the  twenty-first century opened with the government moving in directions not dissimilar from the grassroots movement. The policy for Māori that had been adopted is well in line with the various language rights movements in Europe. Indeed, in both individual and collective rights in education and public service, the Māorilanguage in New Zealand is in a much better position than minority languages under European Union policies.

Broadcasting policy.

This is true of a third important area of activity, radio and TV broadcasting. Many nineteenth-century language revival and standardization movements focused their efforts around newspapers. Led as they often were by highly literate city-dwellers, these i newspapers became both a place to carry on debates about the revived language and symbols of the revival. In the twentieth century, the continuation of newspapers in a threatened language was considered evidence of its vitality (Fishman 1966). The first Māori language newspaper, Te Karere o Nui Tireni, appeared in Auckland in 1842; by the end of the century there were a number publishing news of international, national, and local importance. In the 1930s, most ceased to publish entirely in Māori, and the Māori newspapers and magazines that continue have only a proportion of Māori language content.44

Recent developments in Māori have been stronger with the spoken than the written language. Benton 1981 described the first steps taken this to improve the position of the Māori language in public broadcasting. In 1986, the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand set up the Māori Radio Board to broadcast in Māorinationally. The Broadcasting Act of 1989 included“promoting Māori language and culture” in the functions of the Broadcasting Commission. In the same year, the government reserved a number of radio frequencies forMāori use. In 1993, there were 20 iwi-based radio stations in the North Island, and one in the South Island. These radio stations were required to devote most of their time to promoting Māori language and culture, although a survey in 1991 by the Māori Language Commission found that the percentage of Māorilanguage content varied from 20% to 85%.

In 1993, Te Māngai Paho, the Māori Broadcasting Funding Agency, was set up with a statutory role of promoting Māori language and culture by distributing funds, responding to a high court decision (Broadcasting Assets Case – New Zealand Māori Council versus Attorney-General – 1992, 2, NZLR 576) supporting the Waitangi Tribunal’s views of the importance of broadcasting. There was dissatisfaction with the speed of development, and after review, the strengthening of TeMāngaiPaho was announced in May 1998. A Māoritelevision trust was to be established to operate a separate Māori television channel. This followed findings of the Waitangi Tribunal45 and cited international recognition of the role of minority language broadcasting in language revival.46

Benton & Benton 2001 offer an evaluation of these activities. They point out that the 21 iwi-based radio stations “eke out a fairly miserable existence,” relying on voluntary staff and fund-raising. Nonetheless, they serve a valuable function in resisting language shift “by communicating with their grassroots business in local talk shows, broadcasting world and local news in a manner reminiscent of the Māori newspapers of the turn of the previous century.” They also provide jobs for speakers of Māori. Benton & Benton conclude that on balance, the effect has so far been largely cosmetic and unable to correct the major push towards English of regular radio and television. “If people would turn off their television sets, the channel would not be needed. Be that as it may, television in New Zealand promotes language shift away from Māori, rather than helping to reverse it” (Benton & Benton 2001:440).

The role of the iwi

One final trend needs comment. Before the coming of the Europeans, and for a long time after, Māori life in New Zealand was dominated by tribal organization and rivalry. As the Māori people lost and left their homelands, the role of the urban Māori grew, but the importance of iwi and hapu (sub-tribe) continued to be stressed. Because the Treaty of Waitangi was made between tribal chiefs and the Crown, the cases brought before the Tribunal are almost entirely tribal, and awards that have been made so far are to tribes and not individuals. A clear result has been the renewed strength of tribal bonds, both in seeking redress for treaty wrongs and determining how to use the proceeds.

There has been a recent increase in language regeneration efforts associated with individual iwi, some of which date back to the beginning of the movement. Nicholson 1990 describes the efforts of Ngāti Raukawa ki te Au-o-te Tonga, a Māori tribe situated in the southwest of the North Island, who about 1980 started a series of ten-day immersion courses for teaching Māorilanguage to adults. Te Wānanga-o-Raukawa, a Māoritertiary institute, is a continuation of this Ngāti Raukawa initiative and emphasizes Māori language in its programs.

One tribe whose treaty settlement has been completed and that is putting strong emphasis on language activities is Ngāi Tahu, the South Island iwiwhose language loss was most advanced. A manager for the language project has been appointed, a goal has been established to have a thousand Ngā Tahu homes speaking the local variety of Māori (the dialect is distinct) by 2025, and immersion courses are being offered. Dialectal forms are being collected.

Encouraged also by the Ministry of Education, a Tūhoe Educational Agency has been set up to strengthen the schools that provide service to Tuhoe children. A similar initiative for five Ngāti Porou and East Coast schools is offering a method of dealing with the governance and educational problems of the small Kura Kaupapa and state schools in the area. In March 2000, the Māori Language Commission published a booklet with advice to iwi and hapu on developing long-term language planning. In language policy as in other areas, the tension is slowly evolving between the traditional land-based tribal organization of the Māori people, bolstered by the legal provisions and economic effects of the Waitangi Tribunal awards, and the new urban-based mixed tribal groups which were directly involved in developing Kōhanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori.



conclusions

If I accepted the simple “colonial language destruction, postcolonial revival” formula, I would now be facing the quandary of trying to sum up the success of the efforts at reversing language shift, and wondering, as those who consider the Irish case do, whether more people knowing the language makes up for fewer people speaking it (Dorian 1987). So far, 20 years of activity have produced no more than a handful of new speakers who might be expected to ensure natural intergenerational transmission to their own children. It has, however, made it likely that many of the graduates of the immersion and bilingual programs will want their own children to have a chance to learn Māori as their second language. In other words, the institutionalization of schooling in Māori and the establishing of community support (within the Māoricommunity and in national government policy if not yet in non-Māori New Zealand ideology) are starting to set the conditions for continuity. This is not the “natural”intergenerational transmission reestablished uniquely with the revitalization of Hebrew at the beginning of the twentieth century, but rather the institutional form set up with the establishment of an educational system that kept Hebrew knowledge alive for 1,500 years after the Romans destroyed Jewish autonomy in Palestine; it is like similar programs that are maintaining Irish and other institutionally supported minority languages.

This reading is, of course, much more consistent with the reading of the story not as colonialism and postcolonialism, but as the continued negotiation of an acceptable relationship between Māori and non-Māori as represented specifically in an appropriate sharing of functional distribution between Māori and English (and any other New Zealand languages that may ultimately be included). Bell (1999:540), a New Zealand non-Māorilinguist, describes “the cultural ambivalence of what it is to be a New Zealander in a nascent bicultural society, a mix of two identities, of two cultures, not yet at home with either, but perhaps on the way towards being so.”Chrisp 1997, a New Zealand Māori linguist, proposes a goal of diglossia, very similar to current Council of Europe views of plurilingualism,47 that assumes a continual tension based not on conflictual demands for rights but on resolvable claims for respect. The Māoripeople seem to have recognized that English monolingualism offers them no more than did Māorimonolingualism, and that a blend of separatism in some spheres and amalgamation in others need not mean loss of identity. If this turns out to be the case, then Māorilanguage regeneration will certainly deserve a special place on the list of reversals of language shift.

What, in fact, are achievable goals for the Māorilanguage program? The first Maori Language Commissioner put his emphasis on the maintenance and restoration of good Maori. His successor sets as a goal the learning of the language by a sizable proportion of New Zealanders, Maori and non-Maori alike (Hohepa 2000). The government strategy, as such documents tend to be, is vague enough to be very loosely interpreted and to support the many initiatives being undertaken.

Chrisp 1997 is one of the few recent writers to tackle the issue of goals head on. He presents three possible frameworks. The first is Māori monolingualism in Māori, the utopian and separatist goal of returning the language to its former glory. He cites Hebrew as a case where this goal was achieved.48 Chrisp rejects this alternative as impractical. The second possible goal, which he also rejects, is the creation of local Māori-speaking sub-populations, village or urban communities where only Māori will be used. Even naturally isolated communities (as the Gaeltacht49 once was) no longer are able to last as language islands, unless perhaps they are bolstered by strong religion or ideology.

Having rejected these two models, Chrisp presents the case for what he labels diglossia,50 more or less defined as the sharing by two languages of domains51 or functions in a speech community. He argues that Māoricommunities at the various levels (whānau, hapu, iwi) need to decide for themselves what functions or domains should be Māori, and this decision should establish the language policy for that community. Though still far from simple, his approach offers more promise than the alternatives.

One function Chrisp sees as critical. He, like most students of reversing language shift activities, agrees with Fishman that “natural intergenerational transmission” is the major goal to establish future continuity. First, the program needs to produce students who will take the endangered language out of the classroom and use it with one another, and second, young adults who will marry other new speakers and speak the language to their own children. These two steps, all agree, were the wonder of the revitalization of Hebrew.

But are there examples of similar success in other cases? We have many cases of formerly oppressed minority or local majority languages – like Estonian, Québec French, Catalan, or Welsh – that have used new political power to slow down the slide toward the previously dominant language. In other cases, with Irish the best-known, national language policy has managed to maintain the status and the teaching of a language, but not its widespread use or the restoration of its vitality, in Stewart’s (1968) or Fishman’s sense of a language spoken to the next generation.

In the two decades since the start of Te Kōhanga Reo and the Māori-medium schools it engendered, a large number of Māori have been provided with enlarged learning opportunities. How many of them make extensive use of the language in work and daily life? And of this elite, how many speak to their children in Māoriall the time? It is clear that the various language management activities have led to an increase in the number of people learning the language, and that this has been matched by more favorable attitudes and stronger support for the language. There are signs too of increased use: in the classrooms if not yet in the playgrounds, in parents encouraging their children to show off their school-acquired skills, in the symbolic publication of government documents and in the use of the language in public signs, in growing use on the radio. The report of the use of Māori words by Māori speaking English evidences a strong desire for identity through language (Kennedy 2001).

Certainly there have been important changes in language practice over the past two or three decades. More Māori know their language, and they use it increasingly in education, in symbolic public domains, and on the radio; the threat to its use on the marae appears to have been checked; and there are indications of maintenance of home language use if not yet of natural intergenerational transmission. In fact, a developing pattern of transmission appears to be the school-based second language teaching model that has traditionally been successful in maintaining sacred and classical languages.

Alongside this checking of actual language loss, there is evidence of growing ideological support for the language and its maintenance among a good proportion of the Māori community. This is shown not just in attitudes (Te Puni Kokiri 2002) but also in the large number of Māori adults spending time supporting Kōhanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori. Māori language education has become one focal point for the mobilization of the Māori ethnic revival.

These changes have resulted not just from the general external pressures for ethnic revival, but also from specific language management activities. Cooper 1989 proposes asking a number of questions about language policy. To the question “Who does it?” in New Zealand, the answer is complex. A basis was provided by the work of Maori linguists and language scholars who wrote the dictionaries and grammars and taught the university courses that helped preserve the language. The initiation of management activity, whether by schools, government, or other agencies, was in response to demands by the Maori community for language education, and for much of this, the language managers were educators, parents, and grandparents who organized and conducted the institutional programs and who continue to lobby for government support for these programs. The government policy that emerged was a result of public pressures, channeled skillfully by a handful of language policy experts, into an achievable Maori language strategy. The “what” involved, we have seen, decisions affecting language acquisition, language use, and language form. The “why” varies, of course, with the “who,” but it is significant to note that there is as yet no clear consensus on the precise goals of the strategy; the one agreement seems to be the need to check language loss.

Finally, the question of “with what effect” also requires a more complex answer. First, there has not yet been language revitalization in the sense of the restoration of natural intergenerational transmission. Balancing this, there is good evidence that language loss has been checked, and that school-related and community-approved processes are leading to steady-state language maintenance. From the purely linguacentric point of view, the efforts appeared to have been successful. All of this language-related activity has accompanied important changes taking place in the status of the Māori people in New Zealand, and much-needed efforts to establish equality for New Zealand’s autochthonous minority group. New Zealand language policy for Māori has proved to be a successful focus for mobilization, and combined with other developments, it signals a further stage in the long and often painful process of negotiation between Māori and non-Māori in New Zealand.

Notes

?*Work on this article began when I taught Māoristudents in my classes at Gisborne High School in 1954. It continued during periodic return visits to New Zealand, and benefited from an appointment as visiting research fellow at the International Research Institute forMāori and Indigenous Education of the University of Auckland in 2000. Over the years, I have benefited from conversations and assistance from a large number of people, most of them cited in the References. I thank the two anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this article for their useful corrections and comments, and the editor for her patient help in reshaping the text.

?1Following current Māori practice, I write long vowels in Māori words with a macron.

?2Just as with the term “speech community,” any size group is theoretically interesting, but generally the unit studied is a political one, a state or autonomous region. The focus of this article is New Zealand, and within that, the people of Māori descent.

?3Holmes 1997 describes Māori English and suggests it is a source of innovation for New Zealand English. Kennedy 2001 found that New Zealanders of Māoridescent were much more likely than non-Māori to useMāori words when speaking English (about 17 words per thousand compared to about 1 per thousand). As very few of them were Māori speakers, he argues that this is code-mixing for identity purposes rather than interference.

?4It includes thus the attitudinal factors that constitute what Bourhis 2001 (see also Giles et al. 1973) labels“ethnolinguistic vitality”; other factors in the Bourhis model are matters of language practice, or nonlinguistic.

?5Again, the choice of level of analysis may vary, from a single sociolinguistically significant phonological variable, through clusters of variables that constitute a recognizable variety such as a social or regional dialect, to what is agreed by the community to be a distinct language.

6The interrelationship between these first two components is usually straightforward: for example, a greater number of speakers and a more significant set of functions of a variety generally affects the attitude of members of the social group to the variety, while the attitude in turn helps account for readiness to learn, teach, or use the variety.

?7I call it “language management,” to avoid the confusion in distinguishing between the term often used,“language planning” (Kaplan 1994a, 1994b; Kaplan & Baldauf 1997) and language policy itself.

?8For Stewart 1968, “vitality” refers to actual practice; for Fishman 1970, it refers rather to the belief that a language should be used to speak to children.

?9For a discussion of the contribution of missionaries to colonial linguistics, see Errington 2001.

?10An early textbook for teaching English to Māorichildren was titled Willie’s first English book, written for young Maoris who can read their own Maori tongue, and who wish to learn the English language (Colenso 1872).

?11It was estimated that by 1845 there was at least one Bible for every second Māori (Simon 1998).

?12There might have developed, as in 19th-century Tonga (Spolsky et al. 1984), a bilingual and biliterate society.

?13For background to this controversial, critically central document and its conflicting interpretations, see Kawharu 1989, McHugh 1991, and Orange 1987.

?14The 1847 Education Ordinance and the 1858 Native Schools Act.

?15Simon (1998:7) cites a member of the House of Representatives who saw the aim of schooling as “the civilization of the race and the quieting of the country.”

?16Fenton 2001 documents interpreting problems in the negotiations over land, arguing that the Māori and the Europeans had different cultural perceptions of the process.

?17Belich (1986:132) notes that the Māorimobilization at any time was between two and four thousand, so that Māori were outnumbered from 4:1 to 10:1 in actual campaigns.

?18In this, they followed the Anglicist position in British colonial education policy rather than the vernacular-first policy that became common in Africa.

?19 Māori communities that wanted a school were initially expected to supply land and pay half the cost of the building and a quarter of the salary of the teacher.

?20Resistance to the schools continued in Waikato and Taranaki, regions that Belich 1986 notes remained more or less autonomous for many years.

?21It was a community in Northland where, as reported by Barrington (R. A. Benton 1981), more than 300 Māori signed a petition requesting that the Native Schools Act be amended to require that the teacher and his wife be “altogether ignorant of the Māori language.”

?22I take the term from Ward 1995.

23A recent survey (Te Puni Kokiri 2002) found that 12% of non- Māoris interviewed believed that only English should be used in New Zealand. About 40% expressed no opinion or were uninterested in Māori culture. AmongMāori, 12% were uninterested in Māori culture.

?24Among Māori, the survey (Te Puni Kokiri 2002) classified two-thirds of the respondents as “cultural developers,” people who were willing to share Māorilanguage and culture with all ethnic groups.

25About one-fifth of the respondents in the survey (Te Puni Kokiri 2002) were categorized as “Māori only,”who held that Māori language and culture were the exclusive domain of Māori.

?26As a secondary school optional subject for the Junior Civil Service Examination, and in 1931 as a required subject for boys and girls on Junior Scholarship (Simons 1998:74).

?27Old Māori would become a classical language like Anglo-Saxon, and a modern variety based on it “will continue as the current speech of a racial minority until the Māori homes use English as their common medium of speech” (p. 82).

?28While many Māoris spoke and wrote English well, a “large proportion” used a nonstandard form of the language associated with social class and lack of education. Māori was still the main medium of communication among adults, but children, adolescents, and young adults preferred English. She was, however, encouraged to find that, as they grew up, many Māoris showed an interest in learning their language. “Those who do not speak Māori are ashamed of a lack which diminishes their mana in a Māori setting, and often try to remedy it. Almost every Māori conference that meets passes a resolution urging that Māori be taught in all secondary schools. Though Māori is undoubtedly decreasing as a means of daily, interpersonal communication, it remains vitally important as a vehicle for Māori ceremonial, and the chief symbol of Māoridistinctiveness” (p. 65).

?29Full-time employed Māori in 1997 had an average weekly income of NZ$537, compared to NZ$675 for non-Māori.

?30Te Puni Kokiri (ministry of Māori Development), Te Taura Whiri I Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Commission), and Statistics New Zealand surveyed a sample of 2,441 Māori adults about Māori language proficiency, acquisition, use, and attitudes.

?31The census was based on “unaided self-rating assessment” and includes proxy ratings for those under age 15 (He Kupenga Hao I Te Reo Māori 2000).

?32In New Zealand, Kennedy (cited in Spolsky 1990) sees a kind of transfer of conscience from the campaign against South African apartheid to the recognition of the failure to grant full rights to the Māori.

?33Professors Bruce Biggs and Patrick Hohepa at Auckland University and Professor Timoti Kāretu (later first Māori Language Commissioner) and others at Waikato University were important in this.

?34The Silent Way, a method proposed by the educator Caleb Gattegno (1976), used colored rods for the teaching of mathematics and languages. It allowed new language learners to listen during their early lessons rather than, in accordance with the dictates of the Audiolingual Method then current, demanding that they speak aloud from the first day (Rei 1998).

?35The first wānanga reo, Rei 1998 reports, was held in 1979 at the first Māori University, Te Wānanga o Raukawa. A wānanga reo ‘Māori language college’ is a language immersion program for between 50 and 100 adult students, lasting a week and held on a marae. In the early days, the students selected knew little if any Māori. Courses continue to be offered in many parts of the country. While a national movement, there is strong emphasis on local iwi traditions and customs. Thewānanga are now conducted by universities, teachers’colleges, and tribes, but they remain basically a grassroots development.

?36Language nests are reported in Australia and Hawaii. A bill (S. 91, the Native American Languages Act Amendments Act for 2001) introduced in the U.S. Senate proposed the establishment of Native American language nests.

37Under the regulations, someone starting a Kura Kaupapa Māori must show that there is no state school conveniently available offering the same kind of education. In a kura, Māori must be the principal language of instruction, and there must be an elected board of trustees legally responsible for the administration of the school.

?38The study identified a number of factors explaining this, among them the quality of teacher preparation, the limited time available, and the low priority for Māori language classes in the school timetable, the extra roles a Māori language teacher is expected to play, and the acceptability within the youth culture of using the Māori language.

?39 Māori language policy, but not New Zealand language policy. In the late 1980s, a coalition of interests attempted to emulate the success of those who helped establish a multilingual Australian language policy (Lo Bianco 1987). In response to their demand, the Department of Education commissioned a report on language policy, published in 1992. Waite 1992 analyzed the principles on which a national language policy might be based, and ended with a set of recommendations of the form of such a policy. It fell essentially on deaf ears, and a couple of years later, senior officials in the Ministry of Education knew nothing about it.

?40 The name of the Commission was subsequently changed to Te Taura Whiri i Te Reo Māori, in order to avoid the borrowed English word komihana.

?41 The Inventory of Māori Language Services (Te Puni Kokiri 2000) describes five activities undertaken by the Department for Courts in the Ministry of Justice. The first was the issue of 54 court publications in Māori by the Waitangi Tribunal. The second was the provision of a court translation service whenever 14 days’ notice is given. Special allowances are paid to staff with strong capabilities in Māori. Māori training is available for those who wish to learn the language. Some court offices have bilingual signs.

?42Mīria Simpson, who served as a member of the Commission from 1994 until 2002, is reported to be“loved by many and feared by more for her insistence that people use correct grammar and diction when they speak and write in Māori or English. It is perilous to slip up in Māori or English within her earshot, she has no qualms in correcting careless users of language” (MāoriLanguage Commission, press release, 31 May 2002).

?43The term “strategy” replaced “policy” in internal Te Puni Kokiri papers between March and June 1998.

?44The New Zealand Digital Library is building a collection of historic newspapers published primarily for a Māori audience between 1842 and 1932. See http://www.nzdl.org/niupepa.

?45In the past few years, the issue of the radio spectrum under the Treaty of Waitangi has been before the Tribunal on a number of occasions.

?46The paper written for the New Zealand Treasury on language revitalization (Grin & Vaillancourt 1998) went into some detail on broadcasting at the specific request of Te Mānga Paho.

?47Even a fairly radical proposal like the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights assumes bilingual proficiency in the mother tongue and the national language.

?48Spolsky 1999, however, points out three ways in which this may be overstated. First, the Hebrew that was revived was quite unlike the earlier versions, so that in fact (Spolsky & Shohamy 2000a) it is hard to make Hebrew fit the RLS model. Second, Hebrew revitalization was at the cost of many other languages, including highly significant Jewish languages like Yiddish, Ladino, and many varieties of Judeo-Arabic. Third, Hebrew itself is now working out divisions of functional distribution with English (Spolsky & Shohamy 2001) and other languages.

?49See O Riag?in 1997, 2001.

?50I myself have used the term “diglossia” for a functional distribution, contrasting the oral use of Navajo with the written use of English on the Navajo Reservation. The term clearly covers many possibilities.

?51Another term often used loosely. Fishman 1972 made clear that domains (a combination of social location, role relations, and topics) needed to be reestablished empirically in each community.



References



Belich, James (1986). The New Zealand Wars. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

––– (1996). Making peoples: A history of the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Auckland: Allen Lane and Penguin.

Bell, Allan (1999). Styling the other to define the self: A study in New Zealand identity making. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:523–41.

Benton, Nena (1989). Education, language decline and language revitalization: The case of Maori in New Zealand. Language and Education, 3:65–82.

Benton, Richard A. (1981). The flight of the Amokura: Oceanic languages and formal education in the Pacific. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

––– (1991). The Maori language: Dying or reviving.(Alumni-in Residence Working Papers Series.) Honolulu: East-West Center.

–––, & Benton, Nena (2001). RLS in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1989-1999. In Joshua A. Fishman (ed.),Can threatened languages be saved?, 422–49. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Best, Elsdon (1923). The Maori school of learning: Its objects, methods, and

ceremonial. Wellington: W.A.G. Skinner.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourhis, Richard Y. (2001). Reversing language shift in Quebec. In Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved?, 101–41. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Buck, Peter (1958). The coming of the Maori. 2nd ed. Wellington: Maori Purposes Board.

Chrisp, Steven (1997). Diglossia: A theoretical framework for the revitalization of the Maori Language. He Pukenga Korero Ngahuru 2(2):35–42.

Colenso, William (1872). Willie’s first English book, written for young Maoris who can read their own Maori tongue, and who wish to learn the English language. Wellington: G. Didsbury.

Cooper, Robert L. (1989). Language planning and social change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dorian, Nancy (1987). The value of language maintenance efforts which are unlikely to succeed.International Journal of the Sociology of Language68: 57–67.

Errington, Joseph (2001). Colonial linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:19–39.

Fenton, Sabine (2001). ‘Possess Yourselves of the Soil’ : Interpreting in Early New Zealand. The Translator7:1–18.

Fishman, Joshua A. (1964). Language maintenance and language shift as fields of enquiry. Linguistics 9:32–70.

––– (1970). Sociolinguistics:  A brief introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

––– (1972). Domains and the relationship between micro- and macrosociolinguistics. In John J. Gumperz & Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics, 435–53). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

––– (1990). What is reversing language shift (RLS) and how can it succeed? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 11:5–36.

––– (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

––– (1966) (ed.). Language loyalty in the United States: The maintenance and perpetuation of non-English mother tongues by American ethnic and religious groups. The Hague: Mouton.

––– (2001) (ed.). Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: A 21st century perspective. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Fishman, Joshua A.; Gertner, M. H.; Lowy, E. G.; & Milan, W. G. (1985). The rise and fall of the ethnic revival: Perspectives on language and ethnicity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Gattegno, Caleb (1976). The common sense of teaching foreign languages. New York: Educational Solutions.

Giles, Howard; Taylor, Donald M.; & Bourhis, Richard (1973). Towards a theory of interpersonal accommodation through language: Some Canadian data. Language in Society 2:177–92.

Grin, Fran?ois, & Vaillancourt, Fran?ois (1998).Language revitalization policy: Theoretical framework, policy experience, and application to Te Reo Maori (Treasury Working Paper 98/6). Wellington: New Zealand Treasury.

Hale, Ken (1991). On endangered languages and the safeguarding of diversity. Language68:1–3.

He Kupenga Hao i te Reo Maori (2000). 1966 Census information: Maori language conversational ability. Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Maori Development).

Hohepa, Pat (2000). Towards 2030 AD: Maori language regeneration: examining Maori language health.Paper presented at the Applied Linguistics Conference, Auckland, New Zealand.

Holmes, Janet (1997). Maori and Pakeha English: Some New Zealand social dialect data. Language in Society 26:65–101.

Hornberger, Nancy H., & King, Kendall A. (2001). Reversing language shift in South America. In Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved?,166–94. Hymes, Dell (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kaplan, Robert B. (1994a). Language policy and planning in New Zealand. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 14:156–76.

–––  (1994b). Language policy and planning: Fundamental issues. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 14:3–19.

–––, & Baldauf, Richard B. (1997). Language planning from practice to theory. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Kawharu, Ian H. (1989) (ed.). Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi. Auckland: Oxford University Press.

Keegan, Peter J. (1997). 1996 Survey of the provision of te reo Maori. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Kennedy, Graeme (2001). Lexical borrowing from Maori in New Zealand English. In Bruce Moore (ed.),Who’s centric now? The present state of post-colonial Englishes, 69–81. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

King, Jeanette (2001). Te Kohanga Reo: Maori language revitalization. In Leanne Hinton & Ken Hale (eds.),The green book of language revitalization in practice, 129–32. New York: Academic Press.Krauss, Michael (1991). The world’s languages in crisis. Language 68: 4–10.

––– (1998). The condition of Native North American languages: The need for realistic assessment and action. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 132:9–21.

Lo Bianco, Joseph (1987). National policy on languages. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.

Maori Language Commission (1996). Toitu te Reo: A consultation document about the Maori language(draft consultation document). Wellington, New Zealand: Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori: Maori Language Commission.

Mataira, Katarina (1980). The effectiveness of the Silent Way in the teaching of Maori as a second language. M.Ed. thesis, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

Matthews, Peter H. (1999). The health of the Maori language. Paper presented at the Maori Statistics Forum, Wellington, New Zealand, 11 June 1999.

McHugh, Paul (1991). The Maori Magna Carta: New Zealand law and the Treaty of Waitangi. Auckland: Oxford University Press.

Metge, Joan (1967). The Maoris of New Zealand. New York: Humanities Press.

Nairn, Raymond G., & McCreanor, Timothy N. (1991). Race talk and common sense: Patterns in Pakeha discourse on Maori/Pakeha relations in New Zealand. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 10:242–62.

New Zealand Department of Education (1917). The teaching of English in Native Schools: The direct, or natural, method. Wellington: Government Printer.

New Zealand General Assembly (1880). Education: Native Schools. Wellington: Government Printer.

Nicholson, Rangi (1990). Maori total immersion courses for adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand: A Personal Perspective. In Jon Reyhner (ed.), Effective language education practices and native language survival, 107–20). Choctaw, OK: Native American Language Issues.

O Laoire, Muiris (1996). An historical perspective of the revival of Irish outside the Gaeltacht, 1880–1930, with reference to the revitalization of Hebrew. In Sue Wright (ed.), Language and state: Revitalization and revival in Israel and Eire, 51–75). Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

O Riag?in, Padraig (1997). Language policy and social reproduction: Ireland 1893–1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

––– (2001). Irish language production and reproduction 1981–1996. In Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved?, 195–214.

Orange, Claudia (1987). The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington: Allen & Unwin.

Rei, Randal Te A’u (1998). Wananga Reo as learning and teaching intervention for the revitalization of the Maori language. M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

Salmond, Anne (1991). Two worlds: First meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642–1772. Auckland: Viking.

Simon, Judith  (1998) (ed.). Nga Kura Maori: The Native schools system 1867–1967. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

Smith, Graham Hingangaroa (1997). The development of Kaupapa Maori: Theory and praxis. Dissertation, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

Spolsky, Bernard (1989). Maori bilingual education and language revitalization. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 9(6):1–18.

––– (1991). Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning. In Robert L. Cooper & Bernard Spolsky (eds.), The influence of language on culture and thought: Essays in honor of Joshua A. Fishman’s sixty-fifth birthday, 137–55). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

––– (1995). Conditions for language revitalization: A comparison of the cases of Hebrew and Maori.Current Issues in Language and Society 2:177–201.

–––; Englebrecht, Guillermina; & Ortiz, Leroy (1984). Political, religious and educational factors in the development  of biliteracy in the Kingdom of Tonga. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 4:459–70.

–––, & Shohamy, Elana (1999). The languages of Israel: Policy, ideology and practice. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

–––, ––– (2000a). Hebrew after a century of RLS efforts. In Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved?, 349–62. –––, –––(2000b). Language practice, language ideology and language policy. In Richard D. Lambert & Elana Shohamy (eds.), Language policy and pedagogy, essays in honor of A. Ronald Walton, 1–42). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins .

–––, ––– (2001). The penetration of English as language of science and technology into the Israeli linguistic repertoire: a preliminary enquiry. In Ulrich Ammon (ed.), The dominance of English as language of science: Effects on other languages and language communities, 167–76. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Statistics New Zealand (2001). Provisional report on the 2001 Survey on the Health of the Maori Language. Wellington: Statistics New Zealand for Te Puni Kokiri.

Stewart, William (1968). A sociolinguistic typology for describing national multilingualism. In Fishman (ed.), Readings in the sociology of language, 531–45).

Strubell, Miquel (2001). Catalan a decade later. In Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved?,260–83).

Te Puni Kokiri (1997a). Maori language policy: Language planning (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1997b). Maori language policy: Languages in contact (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1997c). Maori language policy: The Crown’s Treaty of Waitangi and other legal obligations (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998a). Maori language policy: An international example of private sector contribution to minority language revitalization (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998b). Maori language policy: International examples of public sector contributions to minority language revitalization (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998c). Maori language policy: Language corpus development (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998d). Maori language policy: Towards a Maori language monitoring and evaluation framework(policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998e). Maori language strategy: Maori language corpus development (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998f). Maori language strategy: Public and private sector activities and options (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1998g). Review of Te Taura Whiri i Te Reo Maori(review). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Maori Affairs).

––– (1998h). Te Reo Maori (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1999a). Matatupu: How to develop your Maori language policies and plans. Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri, Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1999b). Matatupu: Maori language policies and plans: guidelines to assist public service departments. Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri, Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (1999c). Report on language policies and practices in Quebec and Frysl?n (policy paper). Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (2000). The inventory of Maori language services. Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (2001). Maori students learning Te Reo in mainstream secondary schools. Wellington: Ministry of Maori Development.

––– (2002). Survey of attitudes, values and beliefs about the Maori language. Wellington: Ministry of Maori Development.

Waitangi Tribunal (1986). Findings of the Waitangi Tribunal relating to Te Reo Maori and a claim lodged by Huirangi Waikarapuru and Nga Kaiwhakapumau i te Reo Incorporated Society (The Wellington Board of Maori Language). Wellington: New Zealand Government, Waitangi Tribunal.

Waite, Jeffrey (1992). Aoteareo: Speaking for ourselves: A discussion on the development of a New Zealand languages policy. Wellington: Learning Media, Ministry of Education.

Ward, Alan (1995). A show of justice: Racial‘amalgamation’ in nineteenth century New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

Woolard, Kathryn A. (1998). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In Bambi B. Schieffelin et al. (eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory,  3–47. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.



----


Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxon.)

Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages
School of Humanities
The University of Adelaide
Adelaide SA 5005, Australia

ghilad.zuckermann at adelaide.edu.au<mailto:ghilad.zuckermann at adelaide.edu.au>

Office: +61 8 8313 5247<tel:+61%208%208313%205247>
Mobile: +61 423 901 808<tel:+61%20423%20901%20808>

http://www.zuckermann.org/
http://adelaide.academia.edu/zuckermann/
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/ghilad.zuckermann
http://www.facebook.com/ProfessorZuckermann

Author of Revival Linguistics, Oxford University Press, forthcoming
Author of Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli - A Beautiful Language), Am Oved, 2008,http://www.zuckermann.org/israelit.html
Author of Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, http://www.zuckermann.org/enrichment.html
Second Author of the Israeli Tingo, Keren, 2011
Editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, Cambridge Scholars, 2012 http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Burning-Issues-in-Afro-Asiatic-Linguistics1-4438-4070-X.htm
Editor of Jewish Language Contact, Special Issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2014
Co-editor of Endangered Words, Signs of Revival, AustraLex, 2014

On 10 Sep 2014, at 1:21 am, "Nick Thieberger" <thien at unimelb.edu.au<mailto:thien at unimelb.edu.au>> wrote:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Petra M. Autio <petra.m.autio at gmail.com<mailto:petra.m.autio at gmail.com>>
Date: 9 September 2014 15:59
Subject: Language nests in NZ
To: ASAONET at listserv.uic.edu<mailto:ASAONET at listserv.uic.edu>


Dear all,

Would someone be able to suggest analyses and scholarly desciptions of the so called 'language nest' activities among New Zealand Maori and perhaps Hawaii or elsewhere in the Pacific, where the method has been applied? I am relatively ignorant of the subject but I have understood that the method was first used for language revival in NZ and has since then been applied in several places around the world. I would need some comparitive examples for a project that is being planned in a very different ethnographic context.

With thanks in advance, best wishes,

Petra Autio


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/resource-network-linguistic-diversity/attachments/20140910/19bbcd59/attachment.html>


More information about the Resource-network-linguistic-diversity mailing list