In 2018, historian Paul Moon published a book arguing that te reo Māori is on course to disappear as a living language, and that almost everything being done to revive it is failing. The reaction was immediate and hostile.
Moon's position is that he is a friend of the language, and that a good friend does not offer false comfort. He argues that compulsory language teaching has failed in Wales, Ireland, Luxembourg and Singapore, that fluency figures are self-reported and unverifiable, that no indigenous second language anywhere has been successfully revived, and that te reo risks surviving only in ceremony, the way Latin and Old Slavonic did.
Dane Giraud pushes back throughout: on Israel's revival of Hebrew, on the punishment of Māori children for speaking their language at school, and on whether hostility towards non-Māori learners is part of the problem.
Moon's conclusions are disputed by many te reo scholars and revitalisation practitioners. We publish the conversation because an argument about the survival of a language is worth testing in the open.
CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro 00:40 The book, and the reaction to it 02:15 Why he wrote it 03:10 Kōhanga Reo, and the smell of an oily rag 05:20 Do the politicians actually mean it? 07:45 Does compulsion work? Wales, Ireland, Luxembourg 10:50 How languages pass between generations 13:00 Language as an ecosystem 14:00 No indigenous second language has ever been revived 14:50 213,000 speakers, so where do you hear it? 16:20 The trouble with self-reported fluency 17:25 The risk of becoming a ceremonial language 19:00 Israel, Hebrew, and why it does not transfer 21:00 The 1820s, when most Pākehā spoke te reo 21:50 Solutions, and why there is no magic pill 25:05 Should non-Māori learn te reo? 27:00 The pronunciation argument 29:20 English: muscular, arrogant, invasive 34:00 Was te reo beaten out of schoolchildren? 35:55 TikTok, and the content problem 37:55 The burning marae
ABOUT FREE TO SPEAK Free to Speak is the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union: uncensored conversations on free speech, civil liberties, and the people defending them. Hosted by Dane Giraud.
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