Maori is the language of Aotearoa New Zealand.
1850s: Pakeha becomes main language spoken.
Just two questions.
When was New Zealand renamed Aotearoa New Zealand?
When did the term Pakeha become a language?
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Secret lawyers
52 minutes ago
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From the same article:
"..of a population of 565,000 Maori people, there are only 18,000 fluent speakers. It's a very sobering statistic. What conclusion can be drawn other than to say the language is still in a perilous state?"
What other conclusion? How about the language is dying out naturally despite the efforts of activists and academics to promote it? Because it's bloody useless out there in the wider world.
Our local hospital has the absurdity of of signs in Maori for everything, including the x-ray dept. Now, how on earth can there be a moori term for a technology utterly alien to their culture, unless--like a whole lot of their language--it's invented for them?
For a people who never knew the wheel, never had a written language until Europeans obligingly provided it for them, who were by almost any measure exceedingly primitive, for those people (or at least, those of them who still have more than 20% maori blood) to insist that resources be wasted on teaching a dead, confected language shows just how out of touch they are with the connection between production and consumption.
They're good at one and strangers to the other. Let them fund their own separatist wank-fests out of treaty settlement loot.
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