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Transcript Episode 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 31 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and I’m here with Dr. Ake Nicholas, who is a lecturer in linguistics at Massey University of New Zealand in Auckland and a speaker of Cook Islands Māori. Hello! Welcome!

Ake: Hello!

Gretchen: Welcome to the show! I’m so pleased that we managed to make this line up with me being in Australia and you also visiting Australia. And so the Canadian and the New Zealander will be sitting in a room together talking about language and linguistics.

Ake: Very convenient.

Gretchen: So let’s start with the question that we ask all our guests on Lingthusiasm – how did you get into linguistics?

Ake: Well, if you go back enough into my early life, I’ve got a quite cute life story about that. So my family heritage is from the Cook Islands, which we’ll talk more about in a minute. And when I was a baby, my parents moved back there, and I lived there until I was about 6 years old, which was after I had started school. And so when we moved to New Zealand when I was about 6, I had a little bit of language-adjustment issues coming into an English-medium school, and cultural differences, and migration trauma, and all the rest of it. I got taken pity on by a teacher who wasn’t my teacher, but she was another teacher in the school who was New Zealand Māori. And she pulled me aside one day and said, “Oh, you know that your language is quite a lot like our language? Why don’t you sing me a song and we talk about it?” And so I sang a song for her and we went through the things that were the same and the things that were different. And she told me how it worked in New Zealand Māori, and it was – you know.

Gretchen: That’s so lovely.

Ake: At the age of 6, I was like “Something very exciting is happening here with these languages and these things.” And I was also extremely grateful to her for doing this nice, kind thing and making me feel good about it and not feel stink about wanting to use a different language. “Feel stink” – that’s quite a New Zealandism, isn’t it?

Gretchen: I guess so!

Ake: At that tender age, I became aware of this thing about relationships between languages, and the powerfulness that using a different language makes in your social world, and all that kind of stuff. I was very meta-aware of it from a young age. Also, my parents were really involved in the Kōhanga Reo movement in New Zealand, which is the reasonably well-known language revitalisation method of language immersion preschools.

Gretchen: Oh, is that the language nests?

Ake: Yeah. So that translates as “language nest,” which is what they’re called in other places now. Yeah. So that, as you may or may not know, got started in New Zealand with the Māori language revitalisation. My parents were part of that movement. Being aware about language and being aware about language revitalisation is something that was a very important narrative through my whole childhood.

Gretchen: Were you a kid in one of those language nests?

Ake: Oh, I was a little bit too old for it, but my younger siblings were, yeah.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s so great.

Ake: Yeah. I really think that Joshua Fishman wrote once – he’s a language revitalisation theorist whose work has been quite influential in the New Zealand context for language revitalisation. But he said that when he was a child, every day at the dinner table his father would ask the whole family, “So what have you done to support the Yiddish language today?” So I feel like that was a similar thing for me in my childhood that was a very overt thing that was very, very important – to be worrying about looking after our languages and doing whatever we could to do it.

Gretchen: Maybe just for people who haven’t heard of the language nests – how does that work?

Ake: It’s just like a normal preschool, or “early childhood education” as we call it – so kids, before they go to primary school, or “elementary school” as it’s called in other places – and that’s, in theory, entirely conducted, in our case, in Māori – all the talking, and all the teaching, and all the songs, and not just the language, but the cultural practices, and all of that kind of thing.

Gretchen: Yeah. The food, and going out on the land, and stuff like this.

Ake: Yeah. And all that kind of stuff. And also you don’t just go and leave your kids and never think about it, the parents and the whole family, the “whanau” as we call it, are expected to be involved in their educational experience. And that’s a useful thing for language revitalisation as well, because it’s not just the 3- year-olds who are in there learning language, but the parents who maybe don’t know and the grandparents who maybe do, which was the situation at the time then, worked together so that the whole family gets access to that learning, and it’s very effective when it’s resourced enough to be put in practice.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because you can see if you’ve only run this for a year, then you’ve got a bunch of 1-year-olds who can say two or three words, and you’ve gotta keep going so they can keep doing it for a number of years and become really fluent speakers because that’s how most people become fluent speakers, is being exposed to it from their parents, and their grandparents, and stuff like this. It’s creating a very natural environment, but doing it with a lot of deliberate planning to think about “Here’s how you can actually make an environment happen where you don’t just let English take over.”

Ake: Yes, exactly. And a context like in New Zealand where, like in most English-speaking places, most of the people are monolingual and only speak English, and English is very, very dominant in all spheres of life. And where we had a situation in New Zealand, in the New Zealand Māori context, where there was a time where the language didn’t get transmitted to the children. The people who were my parent’s generation, the ones we call the “Baby Boomers,” most of them didn’t learn Māori when they were children. In the early '80s when this Kōhanga Reo language nest thing was starting up, the parents didn’t speak, or could understand but didn’t speak – were “passively bilingual,” as we call that – but there were grandparents alive who still did. That process made use of those family members that were available to make it work. And the children learning that language in turn facilitate that parent generation learning the language, and that was the model that got deliberately made that way.

Gretchen: The parents can be kind of less intimidated to learn because they only have to learn at the pace of a child, which is maybe just a few words at a time. And they have all that tolerance for error at that point.

Ake: Exactly. Exactly. That happened in quite a grand scale in the early to mid-1980s in New Zealand, and it’s still going strong today. That method has spread to other parts of the world – Hawaii, for example. Another really successful place where they’ve instigated that is in Wales with the revitalisation of the Welsh language. They are doing great there with their language revitalisation, and that’s starting out doing the same the sort of system.

Gretchen: So you had language on your brain, on your mind, constantly from when you were a kid?

Ake: Yeah. Heavily indoctrinated from a young child – yeah.

Gretchen: And then what made you say, “Okay. So here’s this language revitalisation thing” – how did academic linguistics enter the picture?

Ake: When I was in my second year of university, some people said, “You should take that linguistics paper. It’s really easy.”

Gretchen: Was it really easy?

Ake: Um, sort of. But I went along and took this linguistics course and suddenly realised that there was a lot of really interesting, exciting things in that broad area that caught my attention, and so I carried on, which I think is a fairly common story, isn’t it?

Gretchen: I think it’s a pretty common story – yeah.

Ake: And, yeah. Quite early in the – the side of that was what I wanted to study. I learnt that my language, which is Cook Islands Māori, wasn’t properly described yet, linguistically. I knew that that was what I was eventually gonna have to do once I got enough training to know how to do it. There was sort of a bigger-than-me kind of social motivation.

Gretchen: Yeah. And to distinguish it from New Zealand Māori, which is different?

Ake: Yes. Yeah. So do you wanna talk about that now?

Gretchen: Yeah, I guess, let’s.

Ake: Okay. Mostly I’ve been talking about New Zealand Māori when I was talking about the language nests and all that kind of thing. That’s the famous language from New Zealand. It’s usually just called “Māori.” But it’s not actually the only indigenous language that is associated with the nation state of New Zealand. The nation state of the New Zealand is a different phenomenon to what people maybe think of when they think of New Zealand, which is the North Island and the South Island and the sort of main part of New Zealand.

Gretchen: But there’s some other islands?

Ake: Yes. There’s other parts of what is actually – so the legal entity of the nation state of New Zealand is something called the “Realm of New Zealand.” That includes New Zealand proper, which is the bit people are mostly thinking about with the North Island and the South Island just off the east coast of Australia – the “West Island” as we sometimes call it.

Gretchen: Wait, Australia is the “West Island”?

Ake: Yeah. It’s the West Island. So we’ve got the North Island and the South Island and the West Island – yeah.

Gretchen: I like this.

Ake: Yeah. But there’s actually other bits. There’s the Cook Islands, which has 15 islands in it and a few languages. There’s the island of Niue, which is in West Polynesia near Tonga and the Islands of Tokelau, which is up by Samoa. They all have people and languages which come from there. All of those languages, which is quite a few, are technically indigenous to this legal entity of the Realm of New Zealand, which is a different concept to “Aotearoa,” which is the Māori word for the Māori nation, which only has one language, which is Māori.

Gretchen: And that is what’s also known as “New Zealand Māori?”

Ake: Yeah. Also known as “New Zealand Māori.”

Gretchen: So Aotearoa has a language, which is spoken on the North Island and the South Island?

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: And then there are these other languages?

Ake: Yeah. Other different languages.

Gretchen: Other different languages – right. Okay.

Ake: Yeah. And they have a confusing thing – or our two in particular had the confusing thing of having the same name.

Gretchen: Yeah. So is that also the case in the language?

Ake: Yes. So in the language, if you were calling the language by its name, both groups would call their language “Māori” or “te reo māori.”

Gretchen: But there are differences when you actually look at the words?

Ake: But they are different languages. They’re not mutually intelligible. They’re 400 years apart in history and so on. But they happen to have the same name and come from the same place, and the people are culturally fairly similar and look the same as each other, and it’s a bit confusing.

Gretchen: At one point, they were probably the same language, and they split apart and stopped talking to each other as much?

Ake: Yeah. In the migration of Polynesia, the Southern Cook Islands is probably where most of the people who are the Māori people of New Zealand came from, and that part of the migration is the Southern Cook Islands and the Society Islands, or Southern French Polynesia. That’s the immediate jump-off point in that final migration to what’s now on New Zealand or Aotearoa. That happened about 800 years ago.

Gretchen: Which is plenty of time for languages to diverge from each other.

Ake: Absolutely – plenty of time. There hasn’t been ongoing contact between those two groups for about 400 years. So there’s about 400 years of definitely no contact between those two languages. But, indeed, that is plenty of time to become a different language.

Gretchen: Which even 400 years is plenty of time to be –

Ake: Plenty, plenty.

Gretchen: Yeah. 400 years ago is like Shakespeare. That’s quite different.

Ake: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And here’s my example.

Gretchen: Yeah. And 800 years ago is like Chaucer or older than Chaucer, which is really very different.

Ake: It’s entirely a differently language – incomprehensible.

Gretchen: We can definitely link to some sort of map of this linguistic situation with the islands because I am definitely a stranger to this part of the world and cannot picture most of this.

Ake: A map is useful.

Gretchen: There’s a language map we could probably link to?

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: Okay. Make sure to check out the show notes afterwards. Good. So there’s these languages. And you at age 20 or so were like “Here’s my language, which has not been described very well. I wanna write some descriptions of it or make some stuff in it”?

Ake: Yeah. So, yes, eventually. I was a bit older than 20 but...

Gretchen: Young Ake was like “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

Ake: Yeah. I learnt how to be a descriptive linguist. For my PhD, I did what’s known as a “description and documentation” of my language, which is southern Cook Islands Māori. The documentation side involves collecting lots of examples of language, whether that’s written stuff, or video, or audio – as many different kinds of it as you can – and then writing it all down and making it useable for the other side of it.

Gretchen: The translating it and transcribing it and annotating of what everything’s doing.

Ake: It’s an extremely laborious, time-consuming process. And then the description part, sometimes this is called “writing the grammar.” That’s where you describe how the language works, right, from how the sounds work, to how you make words, and how you make sentences, and even how you have conversations. Although, I didn’t get time to do much of that in my PhD because that’s the hard part.

Gretchen: Did you end up having to write a dictionary for it as well? Or were you like “No, I didn’t think to do that.”

Ake: We’re fortunate in that we already had some good dictionaries. A lotta people when they’re doing a documentation project on a previously undescribed language, that’s an important first thing that they need to do is they need to collect as many of the words and make a dictionary. But I was lucky that we actually had that resource already. That made it easier.

Gretchen: Yeah. For sure.

Ake: Yeah. It was also easier that I already spoke the language.

Gretchen: You didn’t have to do that, “Okay. So... does anybody here wanna talk to me?”

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: You didn’t have to do the, “I’m gonna sit with the speaker and record them and ask them ‘Can you say this word? Can you say this word?’” You’re just sitting with yourself and a recorder – or I guess friends and family at this point as well.

Ake: Yeah. More that one. I tried not to do too, too much recording of myself because my language is corrupted by too much exposure to New Zealand Māori.

Gretchen: Oh, okay.

Ake: I don’t have a good, authentic Cook Islands way of talking because I spent most of my childhood in the New Zealand Māori context, so I speak a funny mix of New Zealand Māori sounds and Cook Islands Māori sounds, and it’s all muddled up and funny so I – especially for sound-based things, for phonological stuff – I didn’t wanna use me because I was compromised.

Gretchen: You wanna make sure you’re accurately representing what everyone else is doing and not the individual situation in your own head, which I’m sure is very interesting but maybe less relevant to a broader group of people.

Ake: Yeah. It’s not so much the content of what I was saying, I’m talking about the...

Gretchen: Oh, the actual sounds that you’re saying.

Ake: Especially stress. Because there’re different systems, and I do it the New Zealand Māori way by intuition most of the time – yeah.

Gretchen: So you’re recording friends and family and doing this. Fast forward to today. You teach at a university about linguistics and Māori or some sort of combination of the two?

Ake: Yes. Yes, all of those things. I teach linguistics. So just the normal “How do languages work in a broad way?” and the little, different subsections of languages and how they work and, in particular, Pacific languages and the relationship between Pacific languages. And then also I’m involved in some language teaching for both of those languages – for Cook Islands Māori and New Zealand Māori.

Gretchen: You’re doing revitalisation-type projects? Or I guess is it kind of “revitalisation” at this point if you’ve had this successful program since the 1980s?

Ake: Well, two different contexts here, but in both cases, the answer’s still yes. In New Zealand, a lot of resources have gone into looking after the Māori language and to revitalising and building up and all of that kind of thing, but it’s still classified as endangered, and most of our kids are still not speaking, and most of our kids are still not in Māori-medium schools. Most people in New Zealand still don’t speak Māori. And as a general rule, most Māori people in New Zealand would quite like it if everybody in New Zealand spoke Māori all the time and that was the language that we all used, which is a bit of a difference between some of the contexts in North America about how things work but – yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because there was this thing with your prime minister who was like, “I’m gonna send my kid to a Māori-speaking school,” and she’s not Māori, but she was making this political statement of like, “This is the type of thing that is a very popular thing to do.”

Ake: Yes. And that was received positively by almost everybody – that suggestion that she made. That doesn’t work like that in other parts of the world where other indigenous peoples’ languages, those people don’t necessarily think it’s appropriate for outsiders to use their language. Whereas, in the New Zealand context, partly because, essentially, contrasting to what I said earlier, there’s only one language to worry about as far as people think. That language is associated with that place. This is often the case with indigenous languages. And if you’re gonna be in that place –

Gretchen: You should speak that language.

Ake: – it would be best if you were operating in that language – yeah. That goal is still a little way off. But there’s a pretty positive attitude toward Māori in New Zealand at the moment.

Gretchen: And there’s a few phrases that have made their way into New Zealand English from Māori even if they’re not the whole language.

Ake: Yeah. Well, quite a lot, really. I heard someone say recently that the most unique thing about New Zealand English is the Māori words that are in it – and the KIT vowel, I suppose.

Gretchen: The vowels are also very interesting too. But the most obvious unique thing about it is that there are a bunch of words from Māori.

Ake: Other varieties of English have “this and that” vowel, but no other varieties of English have all these Māori words. And there’s a lot. It’s not just a few, it’s hundreds of words or phrases or expressions from, obviously, place names, and flora and fauna names, and names of animals and plants and things, but also lots of words for other parts of life – kinship words, cultural concept words, greetings – for example.

Gretchen: Yeah. I watched a New Zealand YouTuber once, and she was definitely not Māori, and she just started her channel with “kia ora, everybody. Blah blah blah.” And I was like “I have never heard this.” I had to go look it up. And it was like “Oh, it’s from Māori.”

Ake: Yeah. “kia ora,” which just means “hello,” I think probably you could categorise that as having been a long time ago actually become part of English. That’s an everyday greeting that almost anyone – there’s nobody in New Zealand who wouldn’t understand it.

Gretchen: This wasn’t a video about the language context or anything like that, she was just doing a video about her life, and this is what occurred to her to say.

Ake: I mean, that hasn’t always been in the case. It was actually – this is an iconic story about one of the things that triggered off activism for revitalising the Māori language. As recently as 1984...

Gretchen: Very recent.

Ake: Well, depends on how old you are, but on a human scale – very recent, a generation or so ago – an incident happened where a Māori woman got in trouble, and I think she’d even got threatened with getting fired, for answering the phone at her job at the post office by saying, “kia ora,” which is how we say “hello.” She got in trouble for it, and she, quite rightly, decided that that was an unacceptable thing to get in trouble for. That was the sort of starting off point for some of the more invigorated activism to promote the use of the Māori language in the public space in New Zealand, not just in the Māori context. But, yeah, in 1984, which is quite recent, it was like “Oh, you can’t say ‘kia ora’ on the phone.”

Gretchen: And now, everyone’s saying it, and no one’s thinking anything of it.

Ake: Yeah. I mean, it’s not absolutely considered to be wonderful. There is a little corner of the grumpy old men who are like “What are you talking that language on the radio for? I can’t even understand it. Blah blah blah.” But mostly, people just laugh at them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of – I was in Hawaii a couple years ago, and everyone says, “aloha” and “mahalo” and things like that. That’s just part of how people talk. They don’t realise that people might not know, who aren’t from there, what “mahalo” means or something like this.

Ake: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Gretchen: Okay. So that was New Zealand Māori, which has got this quite established linguistic situation. Cook Islands Māori is different?

Ake: Yeah. In the Cook Islands context, I quite often say that we’re a generation behind the New Zealand context. Cook Islands is, as we mentioned before, not part of mainland New Zealand and, constitutionally, the Cook Islands’ arrangement with New Zealand is that they are internally self-governing in free-association with New Zealand. That means the Cook Islands has their own government that make the laws inside the Cook Islands, but anything dealing with the rest of the world, like the United Nations, or if we decide to invade the United States – or, I shouldn’t say that, military-related things, international affairs – is still operated by New Zealand. Everybody in the Cook Islands is a New Zealand citizen and has a New Zealand passport. It’s an interesting constitutional arrangement, which was copied by the Federated States of Micronesia in relation to the United States. They have the same constitutional arrangement with the United States, different from some of the other United States territories, but – yeah. And that applies to the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau.

Gretchen: And each of those are individually self-governing?

Ake: Yeah. Niue is the same as us, more or less, the same as the Cook Islands. Tokelau is a little bit more New Zealand – not even separate at all.

Gretchen: Right. And so it’s a generation behind in the linguistic situation as well?

Ake: Yeah. Because, as is the case in most of the world, places that are in the tropics, even if they got momentarily colonised by European people, the European people didn’t stay there, which is a pattern that’s happened around the world.

Gretchen: Didn’t like the climate as much?

Ake: It’s a bit too hot for them – that’s right.

Gretchen: A bit too hot for me, I should say.

Ake: So, unlike in New Zealand, where the majority of the population – 70-something percent – still is “Pakeha,” which is our word for the New Zealand people of European decent, in the Cook Islands, it’s majority indigenous population and always has been. That protected that population from the language loss for longer until about the 1980s when one thing that happened was the airport got made big enough to take the big jumbo jets, which increased the number of English-speaking tourists who came and increased the ease of contact with the English-speaking world. And also another thing that happened was TV broadcasts started then, which is all in English. These things happened, which led to, what we call in sociolinguistics, a “shift” towards English and away from Māori, the community language. But that didn’t start happening until the mid-1980s. When I was a child in the early '80s going to school in the Cook Islands, all the kids spoke Māori to each other.

Gretchen: Right. Pretty much everything was just in Māori.

Ake: Māori was the normal language, the “lingua franca” as it gets called – the normal language that people use for everything. People knew English as well but would prefer to use Māori for most things.

Gretchen: And if you’d go to the post office, or the grocery store, or something, everything’s in Māori?

Ake: Yeah. And, importantly, at school the language of instruction is Māori. But around that time, in the mid-to-late '80s, that started shifting, including the language of instruction in schools. Now, the language of instruction in school is predominantly English in most places.

Gretchen: This language shift that had happened in New Zealand before the '80s, is now happening in the Cook Islands in the '80s and '90s?

Ake: Yeah. Now, we’re in the situation that – probably the situation in the Cook Islands now is probably the equivalent of the situation in New Zealand in the early '80s when people noticed there was a problem, and made the Kōhanga Reo, and all that kind of stuff.

Gretchen: So at this point, the parent generation currently doesn’t necessarily speak Māori, but the grandparents still do?

Ake: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, exactly. The grandparent generation – still speakers. The parents – some still do but mostly not. And the kids – definitely, mostly not, especially in Rarotonga, which is the most populous island in the Cook Islands, and in New Zealand proper, where most Cook Islands people live because, from what I said before, Cook Islanders are New Zealand citizens, so just with the general habits that have been happening with humans in the last hundred years or so urbanisation and so on, and moving to the big cities for work – most Cook Islands people, like two-thirds, live in New Zealand.

Gretchen: Oh, so a lot of people moved to New Zealand as well?

Ake: Yeah. That is a prohibitive factor for language maintenance.

Gretchen: Right. Of course.

Ake: Makes it harder to keep speaking your community language.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s a question of, “Well, if you’re a Cook Islands Māori person, you’ve gotta send your kid to a New Zealand Māori school because they’re gonna learn wrong Māori for them.”

Ake: Well, yes. And that is a thing that happens because there’s almost no Cook Islands Māori equivalents that you can do in New Zealand. There’s a few little “Punanga Reo,” which is what we call the Kōhanga Reo. It’s the same concept. There’s fewer of them, but not heaps and heaps. There’s no Cook Islands language-medium schools in New Zealand. So, yeah. A lot of Cook Islands kids do actually go through the New Zealand Māori system because parents are taking the choice. They say, “Oh, well, we can’t have our one. We’ll have the next best thing.” That’s probably a good thing because that’s still getting some of those basic systems into those kids at a young age.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s still a related language, so it will make it easier if they’re adults to try to learn the one that’s actually theirs. Or at least they’re closer in culture because they did have this common historical connection 800 years ago.

Ake: Exactly. Relations between those two groups are generally amicable – more than that, actually – friendly. We’re a close family.

Gretchen: So that’s the situation with Cook Islands Māori. It’s more complicated and there’s less stuff going on.

Ake: At the moment, Cook Islands Māori is more endangered than New Zealand Māori, which seems surprising because people think, “Oh, there they are in the Cook Islands. They’re okay. They don’t have the English problem with the English-speaking people forcing a shift to English that happened in New Zealand a hundred years ago.” But because this modern world and globalisation, the effect has eventually still happened. And now we’re in that crisis point where we’ve stopped our intergenerational transmission in most places. This is a dangerous thing because it doesn’t really matter how many speakers you’ve got, if your children aren’t learning –

Gretchen: In a hundred years, they’re not gonna be around – or 20 years, even, if their speakers are getting older.

Ake: Yeah. As soon as Nana dies, right? It can happen really fast – yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, it seems like, “Oh, we’ve got thousands of speakers,” but if they’re all over 60, then that’s a really unstable situation.

Ake: That’s right. Exactly. In the Cook Islands context, that’s where we are, which is a more perilous stage. And because we’re a smaller language, and we don’t have this status as being –

Gretchen: The prime minister’s not trying to learn your language.

Ake: That’s right. That’s right. Jacinda Ardern is not teaching her baby Neve how to speak Cook Islands Māori.

Gretchen: Maybe she should.

Ake: Well, she could definitely do both at once, right, because babies can do that. They’re really good at learning languages – closely related ones, different ones, all of them. But, yeah, because there isn’t that institutional support in the New Zealand context, where most Cook Islands people are, there isn’t a lot of resources for trying to do things to help the revitalisation.

Gretchen: Right. You’re doing some interesting things with respect to “Okay, there’s this TV coming in. Well, if the kids wanna watch the TV, let’s give them the TV, but in Cook Islands Māori.”

Ake: Yeah. So one of the problems that we’re having with our language revitalisation endeavours that we – the people of the Cook Islands, the older people who are speakers – are having, is a problem that is experienced in lots of language revitalisation contexts where we can sometimes, or often, have trouble gathering up our target, which is our young people – our children and our young people – because something about the traditional way that you try and do it isn’t attractive to them.

Gretchen: They don’t always wanna go off with their grandparents and learn traditional things. They wanna be on their iPads or whatever.

Ake: Yeah. I try to not say it quite as deficit as that. The common thing is like “Oh, that kid’s just interested in their phones, and they don’t wanna know about our traditional things, and they’re just interested in modern life and computer games.” That’s the anti-child position.

Gretchen: That’s the gripe version of that.

Ake: Yeah. I try to say that a lot of our young people are quite insecure about their language skills and about their cultural skills because, along with that stopping learning the language, another thing that just automatically happens – well, not automatically, but often is associated with that – is you also haven’t learnt all these important cultural things too. That can be quite a shameful sort of feeling for people in that situation, that they’re too shy to try and do all of that stuff at once because it’s all really hard because, as we all know, trying to learn a language when you’re not 2 years old is really hard.

Gretchen: And if you show up and your grandparents or elders are shaming you for not doing it right, and also not knowing how to fish right, or also not knowing how to cook right, or do the other traditional cultural practices right, then everything’s bad, and you’re bad at this, so you just might as well just not even come.

Ake: Exactly. Right? That’s pushing the blame where it actually belongs – onto the old people. Sorry, Nana.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess it’s the old people that want the young people to come, and so if they want to bring the young people in, they’ve gotta figure out how to make it enticing for them.

Ake: Yeah. This is a little bit of a point of tension in our context, and I think this is why it’s big in lots of other contexts where people are having this issue. One thing that I try to do in my encouraging language-learning practice – or language teaching practice – is to, instead of putting the pressure to learn all these important traditional things and learn this language as a 12-year-old or a 20-year-old when it’s as hard as learning any other random thing, that I get the students to try to talk about their phones, and their iPads, and the movies, and their favourite movie stars, and talk about the stuff that they feel culturally secure talking about, and the things that they’re interested in, and things that they – it’s not so much the interest side of it, because I think they are often interested in the traditional things –

Gretchen: The things that they’re already familiar with.

Ake: – but the things they feel confident engaging with, where they feel confident or, even in a lotta cases, excited. You ask people to talk about Beyoncé, and they get very excited, and have a lot of things to say, and they have good feelings when they do that. And so all those good feelings will flow onto the feelings associated with learning the language. And instead of being stressed and worried, they’ll be like “Oh, I’m thinking about Beyoncé and learning how to do this kind of sentence.”

Gretchen: Rather than have two sources of tension at once.

Ake: Exactly. Exactly. Taking away one of those sources of tension and trying to trick them that the other one isn’t that hard either. It seems quite a feat, at least for their happiness – they’re happier when they’re doing it.

Gretchen: Well, that’s a big part of language-learning, you need to feel okay about doing it.

Ake: Exactly. Exactly.

Gretchen: You had students make videos about, was it, Harry Potter in Cook Islands Māori?

Ake: Yeah, well, those students made the Harry Potter thing themselves. I was surprised because I would’ve thought that Harry Potter’s a little bit old these days, but apparently everyone still likes it. I don’t know.

Gretchen: I guess so. I don’t know. I still like Harry Potter, I guess.

Ake: Right.

Gretchen: They wanted to retell the basic theme of the story of Harry Potter?

Ake: Well, not quite, not quite. I mean, I’ve got a whole series of these Tampiritoa videos – that’s the Cook Islands Māori way of saying “Dumbledore” – which you can put a link to on here. They just made that up themselves. I have this method I use in-person, the face-to-face classroom, where I have a big box of toys that I get them to with play with. They act out stories and do stuff. They just decided one time, several years ago, that one of these particular doll-figurines was Dumbledore. And they called him “Tampiritoa” and just injected that Harry Potter stuff into the story. It wasn’t like they were retelling Harry Potter, they just sort of mish-mashed it with Harry Potter and whatever –

Gretchen: Whatever the other figurines were.

Ake: What do they call it? “Mash-up?”

Gretchen: Yeah. This is definitely Harry Potter fanfiction.

Ake: Yeah. Well, yes.

Gretchen: Much more than Harry Potter retelling.

Ake: Yes. That’s more accurate – yes. The original one started off – I called it a Harry Potter/Whale Rider crossover. Do you know the film The Whale Rider?

Gretchen: Not really. But I guess it’s about whales and people who ride them?

Ake: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s quite a good film. It’s about the Ewe, a people on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand who their migration story involves their ancestor Paikea, coming to Aotearoa, coming to New Zealand, on a whale. It’s a story set in that community. It’s good. I recommend it. Interestingly, that person, Paikea, comes from Mauke, which is the island that I’m from in the Cook Islands, so we’ve got the other end of that story. In their story, it’s like “He arrives on Tolaga Bay on the...”

Gretchen: And you guys are like “He leaves...”

Ake: Yeah. We’ve got the leaving part of the story, which in modern times, we’ve all reconnected with each other, and we all visit each other’s places and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty sweet. So, yeah, Paikea, who is the whale rider, comes from Mauke. Back in Mauke, we’ve got a place, which is his wife, who’s now stone because she waited so long for him to come back, and he never came back because he moved to Gisborne.

Gretchen: Then this is crossing over with Dumbledore?

Ake: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. The story that they started off making was this mixture of those two things, and then it just sort of carried on because every time I teach that class, I say, “Make a better story than those last lot did,” and so they just...

Gretchen: Oh, okay. People keep adding. This is a very collaborative universe, fanfiction sort of context.

Ake: Yeah. It’s gone a way – if you walk through the sequence, it’s gone in some different directions. The most recent one, which is a couple of years old now, is about Trump and that election and other such. It covers all kinds of contemporary life.

Gretchen: Just various different aspects of this kind of thing. And then so once these videos are created, what happens to them afterwards? Can you use them again?

Ake: Yeah. The context I’m talking about here is the university language classroom with adults, and I make lots of little of these story videos as part of their process. But we just keep most of them in-house. The ones that they agree to, we put on YouTube so that everybody can watch them, and they can take it home, and show their Nana, and get told off for talking funny or whatever. Grandmothers are extremely important people in any family context.

Gretchen: It can lead to shared discussions between different generations about the topics that the kids are already paying attention to.

Ake: Yeah. And it demonstrates to their peers, who maybe haven’t had the chance to learn the language, that maybe if you did, you could talk about these kind of things, and it wouldn’t just always be the serious, traditional things.

Gretchen: It kind of makes the language cool for younger people.

Ake: Yeah. I’ve also done this thing where, in the small islands in the Cook Islands, the language is good. All the children there speak the language, and they use that language at school, and it’s all thriving and wonderful. But there’s 200 people on one island, and 60 people on one island, and 400 people on another. There’s not many people there, but in that small population, it’s thriving and doing really well.

Gretchen: There are kids in those small islands?

Ake: Yeah. In those places there are kids who are super competent speakers of that language. And so another thing I’ve done along this line of stuff is, when I’ve been over there doing other stuff, I have got some of the actual young children, 6- to 10-year-olds, 6- to 12-year-olds – primary school children – to make little stories, little cartoon movies, and comic strips and things like that, which is fun for them because they get interested in literacy and their language and different modes of literacy, so it’s good for them. But also what I’m after sort of more than that is then they make examples of cool kids' language that, if that goes into that collection, then the kids in New Zealand, which is most of our kids, can have access to other peer-language instead of only having old people to talk to. I love old people, but like...

Gretchen: It’s important for them to know that this language is still in-use among kids their age and can be used by kids their age, and it’s not just a grandma/grandpa thing that old people do, and it is something that can be part of their lives the way it’s part of these other kids’ lives.

Ake: Exactly – to use that as a model and to give them the chance to hear how it sounds and copy them and try and be cool like them or whatever – hopefully.

Gretchen: That’s really awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us. If there was one thing you could leave people knowing about the language or linguistics in general, what would that be?

Ake: Okay. This one’s kind of aimed at random people in New Zealand and linguists which is – please stop calling Cook Islands Māori “Rarotongan.”

Gretchen: “Rarotongan” is not the correct word for it?

Ake: “Rarotongan” is not the right name for this language because “Rarotongan” is the name for the specific variety that comes from Rarotonga, and everybody who doesn’t come from Rarotonga doesn’t like it when the whole language gets called “Rarotongan.” And the Rarotonga people don’t like it either because it’s not accurate.

Gretchen: It’s as if they’re taking credit for the whole thing. That’s one island of the 15 Cook Islands?

Ake: Yes. That’s right. It’s the big one. It’s the one that got used to translate the Bible and all that kind of stuff. So there’s all these political tensions. But most Cook Islands people – nearly everybody, I think – don’t like to have the whole language referred to by that name. Some people get a bit a muddled up. They’re like “Cook Islands Māori use English words,” and it’s like “Well, Rarotongan's not a Māori word either.” That’s actually an anglicised –

Gretchen: That’s like an English ending.

Ake: Yeah. It’s got an English ending on it. There is no Māori name for the whole group of islands because the group of islands was only put together by accident. It’s not a historically or politically unified place.

Gretchen: It’s a colonial construct of people coming in and calling them all something.

Ake: Yeah. There isn’t a traditional name for that place because it’s not a traditional place.

Gretchen: There’s an adapted version of the pronunciation of that that’s in your Twitter handle though, right?

Ake: Yeah. Sometimes we call it “Te Reo Kūki 'Āirani.” But “Kūki 'Āirani” is just the words “Cook Islands” pronounced in a Māori way.

Gretchen: Good. Cook Islands Māori, which will definitely be what we call it in the description for this episode – you’ve never done any different, probably, most people who are listening to this, so you’re already doing the right thing.

Ake: Yeah.

Gretchen: Good.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr.

Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo, and I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. You can follow Ake Nicholas on Twitter at @Te_Reo_Ka, which we will also link to from the show notes.

To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to Patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include a behind the scenes episode about linguistics conferences, special Q&A episode, and more. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay too. We also really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren and Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prevost, and our music is by The Triangles.

Ake: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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