The death of language
“Our urgent challenge is to preserve language as a human activity. It’s not a job for a bot.” — Tainui Stephens
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Tag: language
We don’t see te reo as ‘Māori nonsense’
“Te reo Māori is endangered in the land it comes from. It is a language that is native to this country and like an endangered bird, its future depends on what we do.” — Professor Rawinia Higgins.
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Alison Jones: When Pākeha acquire te reo
“I worry that te reo, like land, may be in the process of becoming yet another thing that Pākehā can acquire from Māori, like a unique new jacket that we think suits us.” — Professor Alison Jones.
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Rejecting the System
“We don’t need to try to shape ourselves to fit Pālagi measures of success. Because we will never win, if we just play by those rules.” — Dahlia Malaeulu.
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Language, identity and ‘real’ Sāmoans
“The issue of language and identity haunts all Sāmoans who were raised in New Zealand. I know this because of the recurring conversation on social media around whether you can call yourself a ‘real’ Sāmoan if you don’t speak the language.” — Patrick Thomsen.
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Rawinia Higgins: Regenerating the reo
“My greatest aspiration for the future of te reo is to have a mokopuna, so I can speak Māori to that mokopuna every day.”
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One reo to rule them all?
“If the best resources on offer for our children aren’t in our dialect, then how the heck does dialect survive?” — Quinton Hita on the unintended consequences of the project to translate titles like ‘Harry Potter’ into Māori.
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Don’t you want to be Sāmoan?
“Except for church, our Sāmoan-ness never made it out the front door of our house.”
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A Tongan without the tongue — a cautionary tale
“Rightly or wrongly, my father was trying to protect us from a world that treasured English above all else, that used English as a marker for intelligence.”
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