Te reo’s future

Recent correspondence expresses opinions about the future of te reo. That is not a matter of opinion but of fact.

There are hundreds of distinct phonemes (distinct units of sound) in world language and any baby can acquire any of them, from Cantonese tones to Khoisan clicks, but after babyhood this ability gradually disappears. When Ma¯ ori first met Pa¯ keha¯ , they couldn’t pronounce many of the phonemes of English and in a sense couldn’t hear them. Hence Elizabeth changed to Irapeta, George to Hori and William to Wiremu with no disrespect to English intended.

It is overoptimistic to expect non-te reo speakers to pronounce Ma¯ ori placenames ‘‘properly’’. We don’t have the phonemes.

A second linguistic fact is that no two languages can be spoken by the same group of people indefinitely. One will disappear at the expense of the economically stronger one. Gaulish and Gothic were replaced by Latin. Cornish, Manx were lost to English. Te reo is beautiful, euphonious and embodies Ma¯ ori culture, but it is a fact that it will go extinct. Languages can take hundreds of years to die, lingering on as ceremonial tongues such as Church Latin or marae te reo, but only one language has ever bucked the trend. That was Hebrew and that took the Holocaust, the creation of modern Israel and the intense dislike of the German origin of Yiddish, the former Jewish common vernacular.

Te reo does not have those motivations.