Editorial: No tatou katoa te reo Maori

Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples. Photo / Steven McNicholl

The 36th Maori Language Week comes to an end amid concerns that all is not as well as it should be with the revitalisation of the language.

The Maori Language Commission says that many te reo speakers are professing higher levels of competence than they have and the numbers of fluent speakers could be as low as 7 per cent - down from 70,000 in the 1970s to just 18,000 today.

Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples is examining the $250-million annual spend on te reo initiatives to see if it is value for money.

Such scrutiny is timely and sensible but any resulting intervention needs to be carefully considered. There is anecdotal evidence that the kohanga reo movement has floundered because of official regulation, which has sapped its grassroots energy and discouraged the bilingual elders who were its lifeblood.

Perversely, Maori Language Week has coincided with a push for more people to learn Mandarin. The Confucius Institute, funded by the Chinese Government, has support from the Prime Minister who wants more schools to teach the language "because it is essential for a good business relationship with China".

The goal sounds lofty but anyone who, having sweated through five years of school French, can't string together a coherent sentence in a Paris café will know how flawed it is. Only a handful of school language learners achieve anything like useful facility.

The advantages of learning a language other than English are both cognitive (kids who learn even a little bit of another language are better at maths and science) and cultural (learning how others speak helps us appreciate how they think).

That being so, it doesn't matter whether kids learn French, Mandarin, Xhosa or Inuit. And there is no better language for them to learn than this country's second official language, which they can use every day and everywhere.

Gifted students intent on trade careers can and should be encouraged to learn Mandarin - or Spanish, the language of emerging markets in Latin America. But Maori belongs to all of us.