In defence of the Maori language

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 20

In defence of the Maori language

Derek Davy and Andrew Carstairs, of the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Canterbury, reply to assertions that a Maori language has intrinsic defects that make it unsuitable for use in the modern world.

In his article, “Room for only one language in N.Z.,” (April 15) Robin Mitchell commented on various aspects of the Maori language revival in New Zealand. The status of Maori as an official language is clearly a political issue, on which New Zealanders are likely to have a range of opinions; it is not a purely technical question, to be settled by linguistic experts. But it is important that discussion of this issue should be based on accurate information about the language itself, its structure and history, and its relationship to other languages, especially English. On these matters, linguists like ourselves — people interested in the scientific study of language and languages — do have something to contribute. And it worries us, as linguists, that Robin Mitchell based his opposition to an enhanced status for Maori partly on a seriously mistaken view of what it is that makes a language an adequate means of communication. We would like to correct some of these mistakes. At the time of their first contact with Europeans, Mr Mitchell claims, Maoris had “only the debris of a language, lost progressively as its bearers moved from mainland to island to island ...” The most noticeable sign of this deterioration, he says, is the “loss of sounds,” which he attributes to the alleged fact that, on the islands where the Polynesians settled, there was “little call for an advanced language.” Several assumptions underlie these claims. First, Mr Mitchell

assumes that a language with a larger repertoire of sounds is somehow superior to, or more “advanced” than, a language with a smaller repertoire. Second, he assumes *“0131 features of a language can be “lost,” rather like luggage, in the course of its speakers’ journeys from one place to another. Third, he assumes that there can be communities whose social and cultural organisation is so impoverished that their members need “little more than baby-talk” in order to satisfy their communicative needs. All these assumptions have parallels in the speculations of earlier European scholars, but they have all been abandoned by serious students of language because there is just no evidence to support them. We will look at each assumption in turn. Maori certainly uses fewer speech sounds than English — about 20 versus 43, as Mr Mitchell says. But if on that account English is to be judged more “advanced” than Maori, we would have to judge languages with an even greater number of sounds to be more advanced still. English lags far behind Übykh, a language spoken in the Caucasus region of the U.S.S.R., which has 80 consonants alone, and there are many languages which fall somewhere between Übykh and English in this respect. But the number of sounds a language has tells us nothing whatever about the culture or habits of its speakers. Nor can we derive any such conclusions from the restrictions which each language places on the ways in

which its sounds can be combined. Mr Mitchell states correctly that in Maori “every syllable must end in a vowel” — a restriction which holds also in Japanese and quite a few other languages. Conversely, however, Maori permits some sound-com-binations, which English does not allow; a Maori word may begin with an "ng” sound, so that it takes practice for Englishspeakers to prononce names such as Ngaio or Ngaruawahia correctly. Again if tolerance of big consonant clusters is a linguistic merit, English is inferior in this respect to Russian, as place-names like Pskov and Dnepropetrovsk demonstrate. In fact, however, these characteristics do not make languages in any meaningful way better or worse than one another — just different. Languages change over time for a variety of reasons. But nineteenth-century attempts to link changes in sounds and grammar to external factors such as climate and geography failed. In particular, one cannot say that migration itself causes a people’s language to change. Europe has an example of the reverse situation: the Old Norse language spoken in Scandinavia has changed considerably to yield modem Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, but in Iceland (where the language was taken by migrants in the ninth century A.D.) its grammatical structure is virtually unchanged. More importantly, no community, no matter how small and isolated, makes do with “babytalk.” Explorers’ stories of languages with a vocabulary of only a hundred words, or with sentences only two or three words long have all turned out to be false. All languages have the crucial characteristic that clauses can be strung together and embedded without limit, so that there is no such thing as “the longest possible sentence”

in any language; and no correlation has ever been found between grammatical structure and culture. The area where cultural differences to affect language is in vocabulary. But vocabulary is also the aspect of language most susceptible to change, both spontaneous and deliberate. It would be impossible to invent deliberately a new English sound or a new part of speech, but it is easy to invent a new word; and many new words are added to our language every decade, to cope with both social and technological developments. Maori is just as capable as English is of acquiring new words, both from its own resources (by compounding) and by borrowing from English or elsewhere. The obstacle that Maori sound structure is said to present to this is illusory. Mr Mitchell complains that some English sounds which are not found in Maori are replaced by Maori sounds when words are borrowed from English. But one might just as well complain that English words borrowed from Greek have “become unrecognisable” because English has not preserved all the original Greek sounds and sound-combinations. In the word “psychology” we preserve neither the original first consonant (written, but no proncounced!), nor the original vowel of the first syllable, which was something like the French “u” — sound of “rue” or “lune.” Yet, in the form in which we have it, the word is perfectly serviceable; it does not matter that we have altered it to fit the sound pattern of English. Similarly, “huripara” in Maori is just as servicable as "wheelbarrow” in English. As for the alleged defect of ambiguity, one should remember the large number of English words which are pronounced the same — for example, the several words “bear” or “bare,” which also (in many New Zealanders’ pronunci-

ation) sound the same as “beer” and “bier.” How often, in practice, are we in doubt whether a speaker means “carry” or “expose," "barley-based drink” or “large mammal” or “frame for carrying coffins”? The context almost invariably makes it clear which word we mean, and in those rare instances where there is any genuine possibility of misunderstanding we automatically find some other way of saying what we want to say. In short, there is no language in which one cannot say anything one wants, once the necessary vocabulary is available to talk about new things and ideas. Part of Mr Mitchell’s opposition is based on the experience of countries such as Belgium and Canada, where linguistic divisions have led to social strife. But there are also multilingual countries which are completely harmonious — for example, Switzerland (with three official languages, French, German and Italian, and one other "national” language, Rumansch). A particularly interesting case is Luxemburg, where everyone uses the two official languages (French and German) for formal spoken purposes and for almost all written communication, but the mother tongue (Letzeburgesch) in everyday conversation. The Luxemburg experience, incidentally, gives the lie of the notion that there are some people who are just incapable of learning more than one language; for, since Luxemburgers also learn English at school, everyone there manages to be, in effect, quadrilingual without any special difficulty. As professional linguists, we are not taking any position on the political issues surrounding the status of Maori. But we hope we have disproved the notion that Maori has intrinsic defects which militate against its wider use.