In the same way Maui’s fishing hook reeled in this mountainous little country, or Abel Tasman’s expedition to the Pacific exposed it to the world, my look at Aotearoa’s language dynamics has been just as revealing. Well perhaps that’s an exaggeration, it’s probably more akin to hooking on to an undersized trevally from a two person dingy in the firth of Thames. However you label it, it’s been my journey which has come with it’s own set of bait and tackle issues.
The rigorous efforts of the NZ media to correctly pronounce Maori is another feather in Aotearoa’s cap, hopefully it spurs on the rest of us to be proud of accurate Maori diction. Tau-ranga not Tower-wronga.
New words are created all the time. Words such as Blu-ray, retweeting, crokinole, and yooper. Maori sometimes need to react and create words to cater for these modern inventions using traditional concepts.
Seriously the Swedes get it right most of the time. Skoda, I hear you say? Well even the best fall short now and then but their approach to social governance and education has them top of the pile.
Kia ora y’all. Thought it was about time I put my two cents worth in again. Not that two cents gets you any where these days, it’s rounded up now, no? My ten cents worth then. (Not that the reader has any knowledge of my life abroad but) I kind of miss British pennies and […]
It is probably still the most common form of media, soon to be outdated, but TV can help bend and shape opinions and Maori TV are making a ka pai effort with their channel.
Perhaps being bilingual makes us smarter. Perhaps it would make us more attractive. But very soon the computer you use or the glasses you wear will instantly translate any audio in front of you. A life in subtitles.
Wait. Here I was thinking that my over reliance on emoji was immature. In reality I was ahead of my time. Some linguists are predicting that the future of language is not a global lingua, instead a communication that becomes more digital and visual, we will see more pictures in the place of written language.
Research indicates that bilingual speakers can outperform monolinguals–people who speak only one language–in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important information. Now read that again while making a peanut butter sandwich.
Te Reo me this... 
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