Australia and the World Past and Present

It would be true to say that your average Kiwi knows more Māori than your average Aussie knows an indigenous language.

In New Zealand is it not only Māori people who have an understanding of the language. Many non-Māori also understand it (to some degree) and it is not uncommon to hear Māori words peppering Pakeha conversation.

Māori is an official language.

Many New Zealanders are proud of the Māori language and see it as important part of their culture that needs to be preserved.

The language has links to Tahitian and has regional dialects. Linguists do not always agree on the number of dialects, but there may be around six.

Prior to European arrival, the Māori language was an oral language and didn’t have a written form. When the language did shift into the written word, spelling was based on Northern Māori.

Under the Native Schools Act (1867) the use of the language was banned in classrooms.

There was a large decline in its the use after the Second World War and there is a strong association between this decline and urbanisation.

According to the 2018 census around 190,000 Kiwis could converse in Māori. This is a minority of New Zealanders (4%) but it is still much higher than the percentage of Australians that can converse in an indigenous language.

Around 50,000 can speak it ‘well’.

Around a third of all student learn Māori as part of the school curriculum.

The current understanding is that the first people to arrive in New Zealand came from the what is now the Cook or Society Islands around 1350.

Therefore the Māori people of New Zealand had around six and half centuries to develop their language. This contrasts with Australia whose original inhabitants first came here around 65,000 years ago. In other words the languages of the Aboriginies have had significantly more time to change – by a factor of 100!

Additionally, New Zealand is much smaller than Australia. In New Zealand it was easier for groups to stay in contact with each other and thus keep their language relatively uniform. In Oz, people spread out over the continent and it was not possible for the language to keep from splitting into different language groups that were often mutually unintelligible.

The consistency of Māori language over the land had implications for defense when Europeans arrived on the scene. The Māori people presented a very strong front to the new arrivals. They could communicate with one another effectively, plan and defend themselves.

By the 1970s language revitalisation was taking place and by the 1980s there were immersion programs for children.

The country has goal to see 1 million speaking Māori by 2040.

Today the language is more prominent on the north island than the south island and particularly in the far northwest and far northeast.

The situation of indigenous languages in Australia is very different.

It doesn’t make much sense to talk of any aboriginal language being a contender for an official language of the nation.

That is because no aboriginal language is spoken across the majority of the country. Aboriginal languages are hyper localised. Even in the states and territories, there are usually scores of languages with none standing out as the quintessential aboriginal language for that area.

Another factor is this – many aboriginal languages are extinct.

While Māori has been impacted in New Zealand it has never completely died out. In this way language and culture has been maintained and there is a base of knowledge that can be tapped once more. There have always been individuals for whom Māori is their first language and there have always been fluent speakers.

That is not the case with many aboriginal languages. The obvious example is Tasmania where the indigenous languages were wiped out and so little was recorded that it may be impossible to revive them.

The use of Aboriginal languages in Australia will never be the same as that of Māori in New Zealand and much of that has to do with the nature of the languages themselves.