Who Killed Te Reo Māori?

Killing Te Reo Māori by Paul Moon

A controversy kicked up a few years ago over the release of Paul Moon’s book Killing Te Reo Māori. This was partly due to some critics who had not read it, and partly because of Paul Moon’s needlessly contrarian style of writing. Moon is an historian, writing here on Māori language revitalization, an area of policy which he argues has become self-serving. By means of a Nietszchean analysis, Killing Te Reo Māori concludes that many of our efforts have been ineffective—and may, in fact, be harming the language.

From the numbers we have, we cannot conclude that Māori is growing or shrinking. Moon briefly discusses the census and Te Kupenga survey, but his approach favours a qualitative view of language health over a quantitative view; numbers, after all, are easily bullied into giving you the answer you are already seeking. He even goes so far as to suggest that organisations like Te Puni Kōkiri have “corralled” statistics to “give an impression that a handful of language revitalization strategies are indeed succeeding.” (16)

Borrowing a concept from economics, Moon likens their efforts to supply-demand curves in control economies, with the “supply” of the Māori language being artificially increased by these initiatives, even while its “demand” in everyday life is either static or decreasing. By hyping up the need to pour more effort into the language revival, these organisations and programs only grow bigger and obtain more funding. Thus, they have a self-serving incentive to continue to solve the wrong side of the equation.

Part of Te Taura Whiri’s (the Māori Language Commission) strategy in the last few years has been to improve the public perception of Māori. They have done this by normalising the use of words and phrases in everyday life, including in the English language media, where you can now hear Māori words and phrases untranslated on the evening news. But we are still speaking English on these occasions, not Māori.

Another part has been to appeal to the beauty of the language. This is a mistake, says Paul Moon; beauty is a subjective thing, and not a sufficiently strong motive to get enough people to learn it well enough. He points to other examples where long-term efforts to cherish minority languages as national taonga (cultural heritages) have not actually grown the language: Catalan, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Luxembourgish, and Tamil (in Singapore).

This is a favourite argument of Moon’s, yet in it he is committing the fallacy of composition (to borrow another concept from economics): asserting that that which is true (or false) of the parts must also be true (or false) of the whole. It may well be that an individual effort is, on its own, ineffectual. This does not mean the totality of efforts is ineffectual. True they may not be having enough of an effect—but relative to what? Nothing resembling an alternative is proposed in this book.

His criticisms are also confused by the supply-and-demand metaphor; surely, by increasing the number of people who want to learn Te Reo as a way of connecting with their personal identity, we are, in fact, increasing the demand for the language? That can already be seen in the proliferation of books, television shows, and songs in the last few years.

What Moon really seems to be saying is that the only motivations that will ever be strong enough to revive a language are those that relate to the actual, functional need to communicate. Languages are like living organisms: they evolve, they compete for speakers, they are driven by a will to power—and they are always in flux, either shrinking or growing, but never standing still. The problem confronting Māori is the same problem confronting most other languages in the world: it is being swallowed up by English. Whatever pockets of Māori exist, live only at the mercy of English.

Moon’s linguistic teleology is reminiscent of the master/slave dialectic and especially Nietszche’s idea of slave morality. It also has a strong resemblance to certain ways of modelling language health in the linguistics literature.

In 2003 Abrams and Strogatz created a stochastic model for two languages that “compete” for individual speakers.

¹

At each time step, a speaker has a probability of “converting” to the other language, based on its current dominance and its “status”, which is an abstract measure of how desirable it is to speak (practicality, beauty, heritage). Assuming the two subpopulations of language speakers are highly connected—as they are likely to be in a globalised world—the only steady state to this system is a situation in which one language kills the other.

Taking the same approach, a 2019 paper by Barrett-Walker et. al. forecasted the long-term health of Māori using a system of differential equations.

²

Their model was a bit more complex; in addition to those who “convert” between languages, they also had an “intergenerational transmission” parameter, which accounts for those newborns who learn Te Reo from their parents. They also differentiated levels of language proficiency, with more proficient speakers increasing the rate at which the language can be learned. They also had a parameter for how connected the two subpopulations (Māori and non-Māori) were. When the two subpopulations were highly connected, the Māori language went extinct. When the two subpopulations were not highly connected, Māori survived among the Māori population.

Comparing Moon’s Nietszchean analysis with these mathematical models, we can see that it actually has more in common with certain linguistic approaches than some of his critics were probably willing to admit. That said, his exploration is a bit undercooked. Any interested reader is likely to leave the book feeling underwhelmed, as I did; sure, we could understand languages through a Nietszchean lens, but why should we?

One premise I don’t quite accept is that languages cannot co-exist in a kind of healthy steady-state. This is the case in several communities around the world. It is particularly common in Africa, for instance, where the administrative language might be a colonial language, the everyday language a regional lingua franca, and the language in the home one’s ethnic mother-tongue. Instead of one winner taking all, why can’t the successive growths and shrinkages of languages amount to a healthy polyglossia?

If current trends continue, it seems very possible for Māori to endure alongside English as a language of ceremony, prestige, and heritage. What would that look like? Would we consider it a successful “language revitalization”?

Some people would know Māori, but it would be hardly anyone’s mother tongue. Certain words and phrases would be known by everyone. Senior bureaucrats and school principals would sound a bit more convincing when they started and ended their correspondences with “ngā mihi”, but they still wouldn’t be able to actually hold a conversation about last night’s test match. Most well-educated Māori would learn some amount of Te Reo at school or university, if only to be able to introduce themselves on a marae, but once the pepeha ends, they would switch back to English for all practical purposes; and they would remain at some considerable emotional distance from the language.

In short, the language would no longer be the possession of the living collective of Māori people, the inheritors and descendants of a culture that has evolved its own distinct being over a thousand years of change. It would be a frozen museum, the cold, curious plaything of bureaucrats, academics, tourist operators, and linguists—a socio-cultural performance, not a given tradition, not an unconsciously lived reality. Te Reo Māori would “survive”, but only in a very narrow sense. It would be a language without mana, the substance gone, with only the shadow remaining.

I think all of this is implied by a charitable reading of Paul Moon’s book. But he’s not a good enough writer to get away with everything he says in Killing Te Reo Māori.

Much of the substance in this book is overshadowed by a querulous veneer that never quite yields to hope or intellect. The Nietszchean analysis was interesting but superficial, while the overwrought economic metaphors felt like they were introduced solely so Moon could bestow their chapter with the clickbait title, The ‘Sovietisation’ of Te Reo Māori.

His criticism of language revitalization efforts is too easy and goes too far. At one point, hypothesising about what they would do if the Māori language continued to lose ground, Moon likens them to cockroaches scurrying around after a nuclear apocalypse.

But what pissed off most readers was his most romantic writing, which he saved for baroque descriptions of the possible death of the Māori language. This tone struck a bit too close to Victorian sentiments of Māori as belonging to a dying race and a fading culture. Just look at the cover of the book.

Ruminating on the fate of languages, cultures, societies, and dying civilisations is easy; actually doing something about them is a little bit harder. With the exception of Hebrew—which was in a quite different situation to Māori—there arguably hasn’t been any successful revival of a severely endangered language. Putting the boot in just isn’t that hard to do.

Unfortunately, Killing Te Reo Māori offers no real suggestions here. It doesn’t seem to be enough to get everyone interested in Māori to the point where they learn to speak a little bit of the language. What we need is something more—perhaps not, as Paul Moon suggests, Māori language week, but Māori language year.

1. Daniel M. Abrams and Steven H. Strogatz. Modelling the Dynamics of Language Death (2003). Nature, 424, 900.

2. Tessa Barrett-Walker, Michael J. Plank, Rachael Ka’ai-Mahuta, Daniel Hikuroa, and Alex James. Kia kaua te reo e rite ki te moa, ka ngaro: do not let the language suffer the same fate as the moa (2020). J. R. Soc. Interface, Vol. 17, Issue 162.