Minding our languages

Can we speak, for a moment, unofficially?

Perhaps that’s the only way we can speak, those of us who aren’t fluent in te reo Maori or NZ sign language.

We find ourselves presented with the suggestion from NZ First MP Clayton Mitchell that we should confront a troubling omission; English, he frets, is not an official New Zealand language. Because our lawbooks, although themselves written in English, explicitly confer that status on te reo Maori and NZ sign language and that’s all. The retort from on high - and we’re paraphrasing slightly - is that Parliament doesn’t need to state the bleeding obvious.

English is our national default setting and the two others languages are specified only because in their cases official status doesn’t go without saying.

In their attempts to soothe, officials perhaps went wrong by purring that English is ‘‘de facto’’ an official language.

We can put aside the small matter that de facto is a Latin term and it does seem sort of inadequate if you have to exit a language to define its own status satisfactorily.

The greater problem, politically anyway, is that to some people ‘‘de facto’’ is pretty much a synonym for living in sin.

This suggests English is a language existing in NZ in an insufficiently sanctified state. Can’t be having that, can we?

Even if this were the case, which it isn’t, it would be dullardly to argue that English has somehow been diminished or picked upon.

English thrives; albeit with accelerating changes or mutations that should concern purists who value its clarity and expressiveness, let alone its beauty.

Mitchell does have a point when he says that, come on, it’s hardly as though he’s proposing a complex, difficult piece of legislation that MPs would have to agonise over.

(Sorry, over which MPs would have to agonise.)

But consider this; if Mitchell’s bill is drawn from the ballot and has the chance to become law, the process will be worked through, primarily, in English.

So, then, were the status of English really insufficient, can laws passed in English be accepted as official? If his bill were to have any inherent sense, wouldn’t it need to be presented to Parliament in either of the two (and by his account the only two) official languages - te reo or sign language? And if you don’t need to do that, then seriously, what’s the point of it? -Stuff