The time te reo Māori was almost wiped out in Aotearoa

Thursday, 8 September 2022

Tom Roa teaches te reo Māori at the University of Waikato and sees the effects of colonisation today.

Te reo Māori has been through a lot over the years, facing extreme challenges and surviving only through sheer hard work and determination.

Read this story in te reo Māori and English here. / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.

It bears the scars of colonisation, with many Māori today struggling to twist their tongue around vowels, becoming embarrassed when the words fail to flow the way they should.

So how did te reo Māori get to the point where it became an endangered language?

* Colonisation took away opportunity for Māori to learn te reo

Roa says many Māori learners suffer from embarrassment barriers when learning te reo Māori.

* There is no shame in not being able to speak te reo Māori

The short answer is colonisation, but sometimes the short answer isn’t the best one. Te reo Māori has a rich history which begins with the first waka reaching the shores of Aotearoa.

At the time, many Māori actually spoke Tahitian, Waikato University’s Professor Tom Roa (Waikato, Maniapoto) explains.

“Māori as a language developed in this space so that when Captain Cook came with Tupaia, the languages were mutually intelligible.”

As increasing numbers of English travelled to Aotearoa, the use of Māori grew because Pākehā knew if they wanted to communicate they had to use te reo, Roa said.

Over time, a natural flow of cross-cultural communication developed, but this changed as colonisers wished for more land and resources.

“Their wish to communicate with the people of the land lessened because they had an agenda to take over the land,” said Roa.

Five words every Kiwi should be able to drop into a sentence (first published in 2019).

Thus began the period of the land wars, when troops in many areas devastated tangata whenua.

The language survived, but there were difficult times ahead as the settler population expanded further.

Māori were driven from their lands and this dispossession flowed through to the language, said Roa.

The Native Schools Act was introduced in 1867, aiming to assimilate Māori into Pākehā society.

We answer the questions you're too embarrassed to ask about te reo Māori (first published in 2019).

“The 1867 Native Schools Act established a system of secular village primary schools under the control of the Department of Native Affairs,” said one article from The University of Auckland.

“As part of the Government’s policy to assimilate Māori into Pākehā society, instruction was to be conducted entirely in English.”

Statistics from Te Ara show that in 1900, an estimated 95% of Māori were fluent in te reo. By 1960 that figure had drastically reduced to 25%.

When 1975 rolled around, just 5% of schoolchildren were fluent in te reo Māori, down from a quarter in 1953.

The language was being increasingly confined to rural areas, where the Māori population was greater, said Roa.

“However, as the economics of such spaces affected the population of these rural areas, more moved into town … English became the language of communication.”

The lasting impacts of this can still be seen and felt in te reo Māori classrooms throughout Aotearoa.

Throughout his career, Roa has found it far easier to teach Pākehā, who come into class bright-eyed and ready to play with anything he gives them.

Māori, on the other hand, tend to suffer from what he calls an “embarrassment barrier”.

“They want to learn Māori, but they are so embarrassed that it is really difficult for them to pick it up,” he said.

“They become tongue-tied, and I think it's because of an embarrassment barrier …”

It may take some time for the language to thrive again, but if there is one thing history can teach us, it's that te reo Māori is nothing if not a survivor.