Here's why I'll only speak to you in te reo Māori this month

Friday, 26 August 2022

Waiata Anthems releases 20 news songs in te reo Māori in its September 2022 line up.

Joel Maxwell is a Pou Tiaki reporter at Stuff.

OPINION: The month of September for me will have all the challenges of a journey to a foreign country, but none of the gaudy thrill of new experience.

I will share conversations with puzzled-looking shop staff, who don’t understand a word I’m saying. Only this won’t be some cool bazaar in Morocco – it will be a Countdown supermarket in Tawa, and sadly nobody will be wearing a fez.

Yes, I am returning to the Mahuru Māori challenge this year. The goal for this annual challenge is, as it states, to “make a conscious effort to use more te reo Māori” across the lunar month of Mahuru, which roughly aligns with September.

If you want, you can commit to using greetings and farewells in te reo, or as the challenge’s levels escalate, go straight through to the nuclear option: speaking nothing but te reo Māori in all circumstances and times.

Whittaker's new limited edition Creamy Milk block has been translated to Miraka Kiriimi for Te Wiki o te Reo Maaori.

* Learning te reo Māori 'like going home', says fashion designer Kiri Nathan

* Newshub's Oriini Kaipara on te reo, TV and racism in New Zealand

* Waiata / Anthems turns the focus on te reo

Joel Maxwell: “If using karakia is part of being Māori, then to stop someone expressing that is to attempt to deny their Māori-hood.”

I tried this level myself back in 2018 when I was learning te reo in full immersion. The upside was that I could speak te reo in the classroom, so I kept some connection to other humans.

In 2022 I look forward to figuring out how I will continue to speak te reo in my Stuff workplace for the month and still be understood and productive and not totally disconnected.

I’ve never been much of an international traveller, but I suspect plenty of readers have had the experience of this language disconnect.

I can tell you it is truly disorientating when it happens in your home country.

I will say something simple (because, let’s face it, my reo is still simple) and I will get a puzzled, or in some cases panicked look on the face of the person with whom I am conversing. They just asked me how I was going, now they’re getting a slab of unexpected reo shaming.

Please, if it happens, don’t panic – we can sort this out. I’ll just say the thing I initially said again, only slowly. You still won't know what I’m saying, obviously, because it’s still in a language you don’t understand.

Nevertheless, I’ll persevere – repeating it for a third time, slowly and more loudly. I will wave my hands a little now, too. Nope, that didn't work. So now I’ll restate the sentence, only using different kupu. The final stage will be charades – acting out emotional states, intentions, my simple wish for a cup of coffee.

There are no lonelier words than “I don’t know what you’re saying”; no body language more frustrating than a set of shrugged shoulders when you desperately need to know where the toilet is.

So why go to the trouble? A month of linguistic separation from the vast majority of the people around you is taxing. Not to mention the anger you might come across for speaking the language in public and refusing to switch back to reo Pākehā. Remember, certain people here resent the use of our first language. That resentment only seems to have got worse, or at least more unashamedly public, in the years since I first did the challenge.

Well, every day is a new opportunity to use and thus to preserve our taonga. I love that there is a formalisation of this effort every year at this time through Mahuru Māori: an effort to get the language spoken as it should be, in every context, in every situation, at any time in the whenua where it was born.

I am not a foreigner here. I am not a tourist. Neither is te reo Māori. Good luck to my fellow Mahuru travellers.