Maori as a global tongue

After one hundred and forty-seven years, Auckland Grammar School, one of the most prolific factories of the city's elite, has gotten around to hiring a teacher of te reo Maori. Conservative Pakeha are predictably horrified by this supposed concession to 'political correctness'. For conservatives, Maori is a 'dying language', which is only spoken by about three percent of Kiwis, and has no following beyond our shores. 

Advocates of te reo Maori need to make the point that it is very much an international language. Maori is effectively a dialect of a single great Polynesian tongue, which is spoken from Rapa Nui in the east to Hawai’i in the north to Nukuoro in the far west of the Pacific. 

I took classes in Tongan last year, and noticed how many of the words had corollaries in Maori. Anyone who counts to ten in the two languages can see how similar they are.

When the New Zealand speakers of Samoan, Tongan, various Cook Islands tongues, Niuean, Tuvaluan, and Tokelauan are added together, then they easily comprise the second largest language group in New Zealand. Almost one hundred thousand Kiwis speak Samoan alone. 

And the Polynesian language is only one part of the vast Austronesia family of tongues, which includes Malay, Bahasa Indonesian and even the Malagasy language of Madagascar. A third former who learns a little Maori can set him or herself up for learning one of hundreds of other languages later on.

Edward Tregear's Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, which was published in 1891 and sometimes reads like an antipodean Finnegans Wake, is full of Malay, Micronesian, and Malagasy words as well as their Polynesian descendants and cousins. One hundred and twenty-six years later, it is about time New Zealanders caught up with Tregear, and recognised the international dimension of te reo Maori.