A young part-Maori woman quit her job at the Whangarei branch of KiwiYo last week because the manager of the shop would not allow her to greet customers with “Kia Ora” insisting instead that she say “Hello” as prescribed in the company manual. The usual rent-a-protest crowd assembled outside the company store chanting and displaying placards and the KiwiYo’s franchise owner was forced to capitulate and apologise, suggesting his manager may have interpreted the rules too rigidly.
Uncharacteristically I have some sympathy with the 17-year-old shop assistant, Monet-Mei Clarke. When we go to English-speaking Hawaii we don’t have any difficulty with being greeted with “Aloha” particularly when it is expressed by a captivating young native-Hawaiian female at the airport as she seductively places a fresh flower lei around your craning neck.
We use Maori cultural ceremonies when and where it suits us to make us look attractively bi-cultural and we have a sense of great pride when the All Blacks do the Haka, particularly at overseas arenas.
But at other times we are a shade petulant.
Recently there was a call to make teaching Te Reo Maori compulsory in schools. However, perhaps sensibly, this suggestion was considered a step too far by both major political parties.
Sir Robert Jones, writing in the Wanganui Chronicle, had even stronger views. He was utterly opposed to the promotion of everyone learning to speak Maori which he said we are wrongly told is part of our cultural heritage. He reckoned that millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money had already been spent, with abysmal results.
“Even the Maori King can’t speak Maori,” claimed Sir Robert.
“The sole purpose of language is communication and romanticising obtuse virtues about it is pretentious nonsense. Artistic expression such as poetry and prose is not about individual words which in themselves have no special merit, but instead their placement. The Welsh endured this foolishness by their zealots and vast sums were spent promoting their redundant language, all pointlessly as the Welsh sensibly ignored these efforts,” Jones wrote.
In his 2006 book How the Language Works the noted Welsh linguistics Professor David Crystal observed that linguistic nationalism invariably promoted separatist political demands, causing resentment and an unnecessarily divided community. This sounds frighteningly familiar.
Whereas most languages can number their words at around 200,000 the Maori dictionary only contains somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words. Contrast this with the English language which has more than a million words and is still growing. English literature from Chaucer to Elliot, from Shakespeare to Hemingway is the richest and most extensive on earth.
So when you’re studying English, you’re studying one of the world’s greatest languages and the most interesting subjects.
There is no doubt that from the earliest times the favoured group of people has always been the educated class. They can make themselves recognised instantly, anywhere, by the simple expedient of speaking a few words. In can be argued that our language, more than anything else, determines which rung we position ourselves on life’s ladder of success.
Many years ago a graduating class of a large American university was given an examination in English vocabulary. The test scores were graded into groups of 5 per cent – the top 5 per cent and so on to the bottom. At regular intervals during the next 20 years, questionnaires were sent out to the surviving graduates asking them their occupations and their incomes. Without a single exception those who had the highest score on the vocabulary test were among the top income group, while those who had scored lowest were in the bottom income group.
A person may dress in the latest fashion and present a very attractive appearance. So far, so good, but the minute they open their mouths and begin to speak they proclaim to the world the level of their potential competency. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which was later adapted into the musical comedy My Fair Lady is an extreme example of this.
Our use of our language is the one thing we can’t hide.
To learn a second language, be it Maori or Mandarin, will be a satisfying, mind-expanding experience. Ms Clarke says that Maori is spoken constantly at home.
If her family takes English just as seriously I have no doubt she will soon move on to a vocation more fulfilling that selling frozen yoghurt cones.
Haere ra.
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