Great-grandfather, please teach me my language!
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Tania M. Ka’ai
Abstract
Inspired by Joshua Fishman’s lifetime dedication to the revitalisation of minority languages, especially Yiddish, this paper presents my personal story of the loss of the Māori language in my family in New Zealand/Aotearoa and our attempts to reverse this decline over several generations. The paper includes a description of several policy reforms and events in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s history and the impact of colonisation on the Māori language, which, as seen in other colonised peoples around the world, has contributed to the decline of this indigenous language. The paper also presents the mobilisation of Māori families and communities, including my own family, to establish their own strategies and initiatives to arrest further language decline and to reverse language loss in Māori families in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article, combining story and history, should be read as a historiography of the Māori language, based on the author’s acknowledgement that other indigenous minority communities, globally, and their languages also have experienced the effects of colonisation and language loss. This article, much like a helix model, weaves together a narrative and history of Māori language loss, pain, resilience, and hope and seeks to establish that no language, because it contains the DNA of our cultural identity, should be allowed to die. A table of key landmarks of the history of the Māori language also is included.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction: Regional and international perspectives on language activism
- Great-grandfather, please teach me my language!
- Developing a materialist anti-racist approach to language activism
- ‘My tribe is the Hessequa. I’m Khoisan. I’m African’: Language, desire and performance among Cape Town’s Khoisan language activists
- Linguistic landscapes and the sociolinguistics of language vitality in multilingual contexts of Zambia
- Assessing forty years of language planning on the vitality of the Francophone and Anglophone communities of Quebec
- Activism: Loving your languages and fighting for them
- Book Review
- Ingrid Piller: Linguistic diversity and social justice: An introduction to applied sociolinguistics
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Introduction: Regional and international perspectives on language activism
- Great-grandfather, please teach me my language!
- Developing a materialist anti-racist approach to language activism
- ‘My tribe is the Hessequa. I’m Khoisan. I’m African’: Language, desire and performance among Cape Town’s Khoisan language activists
- Linguistic landscapes and the sociolinguistics of language vitality in multilingual contexts of Zambia
- Assessing forty years of language planning on the vitality of the Francophone and Anglophone communities of Quebec
- Activism: Loving your languages and fighting for them
- Book Review
- Ingrid Piller: Linguistic diversity and social justice: An introduction to applied sociolinguistics
