LANGUAGES FOR AFRICA

Sally Blundell writes in her story on te reo about our “staunch and globally unusual monolingualism” (“Tiakina te reo”, June 30). This attitude sees New Zealand as English or Māori and was obvious, too, in the flag debate. It was most offensive to New Zealanders whose families had suffered badly under the British flag, and often spoke another language such as Irish, Korean or an Indian language.

It’s simply not true that we are monolingual. In my family, German, Italian, French, Japanese, Norwegian, some Chichewa and Spanish are spoken. Friends talk Russian, Vietnamese, Estonian, Finnish, Chinese, Afrikaans and Dutch. Their kids are sometimes multilingual. My son’s school classes have had kids fluent in Korean, Tagalog, Chinese, Urdu and Hindi, among others.

And what about all those speakers of Samoan, Niuean, Fijian and Arabic? Don’t they count? It was the same when I lived in Germany: the locals oohed and aahed at my fouryear-old’s fluency in English and German, but disparaged Turkish- and Arabic-speaking kids.

Kiwis travel widely and regularly learn the languages of the lands they work in: Dutch, Japanese, Arabic, Indonesian or whatever. All these languages should be celebrated. All those bi- and multilingual kids raise the IQ of New Zealand. The more the merrier. And let’s stop insulting so many of our people.

Chris Blackman (Tasman)