Celebrating our taonga

They held a quiz night in Wairarapa this week – nothing too unusual in that. Except that it was conducted entirely in te reo. Given how little te reo most of us know, it might be a fair bet that some of the scores were pretty low. So why bother, you might ask? Well, why not? The point of Te Wiki o te Reo, surely, is not that we should all speak it, but that we should celebrate its continued existence.

Too many people get caught up in arguments about how useful (or not) te reo might be. But that misses the point. Welsh, Irish and Basque are not ‘‘useful’’, insofar as those who speak them are typically fluent in more mainstream languages too. But what a dull world it would be without the tongues that gave us words like ‘‘craic’’, or that railway station that nobody outside Wales can pronounce.

There are those who go still further down the rabbit hole of lunacy and subscribe to the theory that, if we give an inch now, it won’t be long before we’re all forced to speak nothing but te reo, and English will vanish from these shores. A variation of this delusion has been doing the rounds of Wellington city councillors, who have been firing passively aggressive emails at one another this week over giving an alternative name to the Botanic Garden. Note the word ‘‘alternative’’ – not an obligatory new name, just another one we can use if we wish.

Nobody is forcing us to learn te reo, but even if they did, would that be so terrible? Familiarity with other languages and cultures has long been a sign of wisdom and understanding. We could all do with a bit of that – especially on our councils.