Room for only one language in N.Z.

Press, 15 April 1986, Page 16

Room for only one language in N.Z.

ROBIN MITCHELL discusses the pitfalls of making Maori an official language on an equal footing with English. A retired tutor at Christchurch Polytechnic, where he taught English among other subjects, Mr Mitchell is the author of a textbook on communication. He has also been a member of a refugee resettlement group for many years and is at present its chairman.

Maori seems to be on the way to becoming an official language on a par with English. Parity would be a disaster to everyone on these islands, especially speakers of Maori. The great tragedy is that when the “save-Maori” drive began we were on the verge of that unity of purpose and understanding which goes with sharing one language, everywhere perfectly understood and the first language of everyone but the most recent of immigrants. We had unity of language within our grasp, and blew it, or are well on the way to blowing it. The fault is mostly with previous generations of non-Maoris, who failed to accommodate into English those concepts without which Maori culture finds self-expres-sion difficult. Nevertheless, the chief sufferers from a national languageschizophrenia will be the Maorispeakers — amongst many other things because they will be in a minority shut off from the majority, because they will be cut off from overseas contacts, because they will no longer be competent in English, thereby guaranteeing their unemployment, and because the Maori language is inadequate for current living, let alone the future.

We should have only one language, and it should be English. We should have only one language because there is no greater opportunity for misunderstanding between people than if they speak different languages. World-wide it is rightly considered discourteous, if not downright insulting, to speak in front of someone in a language he or she does not understand, unless a translation is provided; yet that is going on here with television and radio and at various Maori receptions, and even occasionally elsewhere.

We should make a point of complaining to those responsible. Even though remarks may be innocuous, suspicions are tooeasily aroused. As all Maorispeakers now understand English whereas very many English speakers do not understand Maori, English should remain the sole public language except for foreign visitors and recent immigrants. (For the benefit of every-* body, the language should be as simple as circumstances allow,' and terms explained if anyone present may not understand.) We should have only one language because otherwise all warnings and cries for help, all transport and communications data and contact, all signs and instructions — not to mention everything to do with laws and by-laws, medicine, education, the

media, the lot — must be in at least two languages, greatly increasing costs and often undermining safety. We should have only one language because translations, no matter how inspired the translator, can never completely convey the meaning in the other language. This is especially so when one of the languages does not possess the nuances available to the other, and this is true of Maori in relation to English. A cautionary tale is provided by the misunderstanding resulting from the various versions and translations of the Treaty of Waitangi. Worse than this, language differences could have had a lot to do with our civil wars. The missionaries, following normal church practice, had the Maori language written down and then started an education system in Maori to enable the Maoris to read the Bible and other Christian works; the schools continued to teach at least partly in Maori right up to 1860 when the wars began, in spite of observations by people such as Joel Polack (1837): “The natives in every portion of the islands are anxious to speak the English language

. . .” or Arthur Thomson (1859): “Before the natives can advance . . . above the hewers of wood and drawers of water, they must acquire some farther knowledge of the settlers’ language ... the present mode of education tends to perpetuate rather than remove the impediment. Harmony and co-operation may exist between races ignorant of each other’s language, but community of feeling is impossible.” Harmony and co-operation did not ir fact exist, as evidenced by the wars.

So, we should have only one language; and that language should be English. Let’s dispose of a red herring: there is no case at all for anyofficial language here other than English or Maori, except as a second language. Artificial “universal” languages such as Esperanto have not taken on anywhere sufficiently to be seriously considered, while to convert to any language other than is already spoken would require a huge effort by every citizen and a huge expense by every corporate organisation from the Government down.

This, by the way, is what is already beginning to happen With the moves to re-establish Maori. There are many positive things we could be doing with the money and time we are spending on this incitement to disunity.

English is international. Almost everywhere in the world

we can get by with English. To say, as some do, that it would be more courteous to learn the languages of every place we might visit is nonsense — there are a dozen major languages and many thousands of others. If we as individuals are going to live for a while in another country, or have dealings over a period with someone other than an English-speaker, certainly we should learn the relevant language; but for normal contact we can rely on English.

In New Zealand we do not at present need to learn Maori to communicate freely; the saveMaori movement threatens to change this. Let us ask ourselves before it is too late: do we want to lose our ability to communicate freely within New Zealand? ‘Do we want to be foreigners in our own country?

A switch to Maori would jeopardise our attraction for tourists and our awareness of danger. A Welsh nationalist, active in promoting the Welsh language, was caught in a plane hijack; his first words to reporters on release were: “Thank God for English!” English keeps us in touch with the rest of the world, to understand its offers of friendship and its threats; Maori would cut us off from everywhere except Polynesia. English has depths and nuances quite beyond the possibilities of Maori. This is true partly because of its history as an amalgam of Latin and Greek, Celtic and Old Scandinavian, Saxon and Norman-French, and its continued readiness to absorb foreign words and expressions 'and even constructions; but more relevantly and far more crucially ! because of its present world-wide catchment which makes it a great river, by comparison with which Maori is only a trickle. English has a wealth of technical resources, necessary to explain and carry forward the advances in world knowledge of our universe and ourselves. At first contact between English and Maori, English had already the infrastructure on which have been built the concepts, constructions, and terminology of modern discovery; Maori had only the debris of a language lost progressively as its bearers moved from

mainland to island to island to a climatically bleak Aotearoa. Since first contact, while English has expanded exponentially, Maori has moved hardly at all. Not only has Maori no present wealth of resources but, intrinsically, no hope of ever acquiring them, except possibly by the wholesale assimilation of English. The most debilitating change from ancestral Maori to the present, making the reasonable assumption that speakers long ago on the mainland had a language of compatible richness to its coevals, is a loss of sounds. It is as if on the islands on which the ancestral Polynesians settled there was so little call for an advanced language that much of it was dropped through disuse, and that in fact what the children learnt was little more than baby-talk. This would be especially true in the beginning, when the settlements were small and isolated.

When Cambridge Professor Samuel Lee in 1820 wrote down the northern Maori language of the day he recorded only 15 sounds, and in some other parts of New Zealand the number was only 14 or even 13, an example of deterioration of language in small isolated groups. Even allowing short vowels as different from long the number is no greater than 20, and there is the additional restriction that every syllable must end in a vowel. By comparison, standard English has about 43 sounds, with few more distinguishable in other varieties of the language. The result of the Maori poverty of sounds is ambiguity. Very many words have half a dozen completely different meanings even within the restricted range of uses needed in classical Maori times. With the loss of alternatives in sounds, English words become unrecognisable and may converge: for example, h may be simply that as in haona (horn), or may serve for sh (hooro: shawl — and incidentally also hall); or for s (hoia: soldier or sawyer); or for j (Huune: June); or even for English wh (huriparo: wheelbarrow). If speakers of Maori want it to be taken seriously it must acknowledge what we all know: that Maoris are quite capable of

■pronounsing sh, s, j, and wh as well as h; but this would result in a wholesale assimilation of English. A more logical development would be to foster a much larger, number of borrowings from Maori into New Zealand English, making it more capable of carrying a New Zealand culture in which Polynesian contributions would be equally at home as European ones. The old Maori schools of the Education Department which for generations taught Maori pupils only in English, and the Maori parents who supported them, are these days much criticised. But while their methods may sometimes not have been aligned with modem educational theories, they were in fact responsible for what we all want and were beginning to get when the "saveMaori” drive began — equality of attainment by Maoris and nonMaoris.

It was not long ago (August 20, 1985) that “The Press” reported Bill Renwick, Director-General of Education, as saying that, although the rate of School Certificate passes by Maoris is still somewhat lower than for others the Maoris are catching up fast — or were.

Will someone going to Kaihanga Reo for kindergarten and then to a school where the instruction is in Maori be as hopeful of passing an exam in English as a person taught in English? The exams could also be in Maori, but who is going to employ someone in any job requiring knowledge of English if their education has been in Maori? The dire results of a dichotomy of language can be seen in the chronic separation and internal friction generated in countries like Canada by having two languages of equal status; a similar state of affairs involving French and Dutch in Belgium was reported very recently, again in “The Press” (March 27, 1986). Plenty of other examples of language friction spring to mind, such as with the Basque language in Spain, or Gujarati in the Hindi milieu of India. Language split can be the precursor of national disintegration, as when the Slovak independence movement was seized on by Hitler to complete the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

Of course, there were and are other divisive issues in those cases; but speaking different languages prevents the protagonists from speaking directly to one another.

Among the chief gifts which separates human beings from other mammals is our ability to speak to one another, but a division in speech frustrates this. Some countries are stuck with language division as a legacy from the past; we have a legacy of one language. May we not let it be squandered, and in particular may we not spend millions in making sure it is squandered, as we are doing by fostering the revival of the Maori language.