Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Jacob Levy comments on a New York Times article that mentions a new Maori TV network in New Zealand:
Over the last couple of decades, in an effort to address the past wrongs, New Zealand's courts and Parliament have extended rights and benefits to the Maori, who make up about 15 percent of the population. This week a Maori television network, supported by government money, began broadcasting, though only 10 percent of the Maori are fluent in their native tongue.
Levy's primary point is that it's silly to refer to Maori as the "native" language "the Maori" if only 10% of them are fluent in it. He's right on that point, I think, but he also mentions that he's skeptical about the Maori language revival project. I'd like to point out a couple of interesting wrinkles he may not have considered.
First, it's possible that many more Maori actually learned Maori as their true native language when they were children, then lost their fluency (and replaced it with native or near-native fluency in English) as they got older and were immersed in the wider English-speaking culture. Whether this is true or not is an empirical question that I don't know the answer to. Anybody know offhand? (My eXTReMe Tracking stats say I've had one visitor from New Zealand. Come back and help us out!)
Second, even if it's true that only 10% of the Maori are fluent in Maori, if they're 15% of the population then the TV network would have a potential audience of 1.5% of just over 4 million people. This agrees with Ethnologue's claim of "50,000 to 70,000 speakers...[and] 100,000 who understand it, but do not speak it". 50,000 to 150,000 people isn't an MTV-size audience, it's certainly not tiny, either. And if there are a significant number of young Maori speakers who lose their fluency later on, a TV network might be just sort of thing that could help reinforce and preserve the language (as I mentioned in a previous post).
[Now playing: "#1 Da Woman" by Tricky]
I lived in NZ from 1997 - 2000. Its worth noting that Maori is an offical language in NZ. While the availabilty of official documents in Maori falls behind the availablity of French documents in Canada, the same sort of constitutional obligations exist in both countries. Arguably the government has an obligation to help support such a television station, as a matter of the Treaty of Waitangi. Looked through this lense its not a matter of how many people speak the language, native or not, or of the virtues of reviving languages.
Your post actually reminded me of an incident in which Maori members of the Labour party gave a number of speeches in the parliment in Maori, without providing translations to the opposition National party. (They did however provide them to members of their own party who weren't fluent.) This is a political stunt that couldn't happen in Canada because of the government support for both official languages -- parliment has real time translation. I suspect increased government support of Maori might actually over time make it less of an issue, in much the way that the language wars in Canada have cooled down some since we got serious about French as an offical language.
Posted by: Nicole Wyatt | April 14, 2004 at 11:01 AM
I've heard good things about the Maori 'language nests', where they immerse very young children with fluent speakers for quite a few hours a day.
Posted by: Almeda | December 20, 2006 at 09:34 PM