Te Wiki o te Reo Maori

Kia ora koutou katoa (Greetings to you all). It's Maori language week here in Aotearoa, New Zealand but at the Wananga (place of higher learning) where I work we have it every week as Maori is spoken alongside English with many bilingual speakers of both languages.

It's also probably one of the few learning institutions where karakia (prayers) are still said every morning at 8.30 am to start the day and waiata (songs) are sung throughout the day as appropriate. Here things are very different from mainstream education and I prefere it.

I remember as a child growing up that I hardly ever heard Te reo Maori (the Maori language) being spoken and only ever heard teachers of Maori speaking to one another but at the parks and places English was the main language spoken by many urban Maori that I was aware of.

In fact, I remember that it was very normal and commonplace to mispronounce Maori place names and if you said it correctly that people would actually think less of you (heaps of racism at the time). Now I make an effort to correctly pronounce the Maori place names whenever I speak to someone on the phone or talking to those of other cultures. I guess it's become more normalised for me to speak it correctly as now my children are.

I'll leave you with a whakatauki (Maori proverb) regarding the importance of language. "Ko te reo te taikura o te whakaao marama" and the English translation is: Language is the key to understanding. For me, it means that when I begin to learn and discover someone else's language, I begin to understand more about them.

Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa. (Thank you, thank you, greetings to us all).