07-05-2025
General Debate 08 May 2025
I have posted quite often on changing language usage and why I think this will continue to make Maori less and less useful. This has been based, mainly, on my experiences with Zulu and Xhosa.
Last night I watched an interesting interview of an Ndebele officer in the Zimbabwean Army about some operations in DRC.
Ndebele is close enough to Zulu that I can understand almost all of what he is saying.
What I found interesting: * Zulu and Ndebele are very similar with the same nouns and verbs for common day to day speech that is unchanged for centuries. For example, house, tree, water, run, hit, … These are concepts that have been with humans a long time so you can expect the same words to be used as the languages evolve. The word for goat is the same in Tanzania and Xhosa even though the languages split well over 1000 years ago and they exist thousands of km apart. * The languages diverge in their borrow words. For example the Ndebele for boat is 'boata' (obviously from 'boat') while for Zulu it is isikebhe (which derives from 'schip' – the Dutch word for ship). This makes sense since the borrow words get into the language via different routes, so you can expect differences like this. * The Ndebele words for numbers are the same as Zulu. This is a cumbersome system. The Ndebele have done what the Zulu do and flip over to using English numbers for anything beyond very small numbers (1, 2, 3, 10). Thus numbers are generally transplanted.
* As soon as he started speaking about any military concepts he flipped over to speaking in English, even if he just dropped in a word or a phrase into a sentence. Makes sense since these are concepts that don't exist in the Ndebele cultural vocabulary and training on military doctrine is all in English.
Thus we can basically split the language components into three parts: * The historic, original, host language. These are the words, grammar and concepts that go back centuries. * The borrow words. By my definition (I am not a formal linguist), borrow words are foreign words which have been adapted to fit in with the host language when the host (ie. borrowing) culture encounters them for the first time. They are then used as new words in the host language. Examples are pirihimana (policeman) borrowed in to Maori or kumara, Taupo etc borrowed in to English.
* Transplanted words and phrases (again, my unofficial definition) . The distinction between borrow words and transplanted words and phrases is that borrow words are modified to fit into the host language grammar etc while transplanted words and phrases are not. Transplanted words and phrases are bits of English (or whatever) spliced in.
To now extrapolate this into Maori in NZ: * There is really no solid Maori cultural/social life – as distinct from modern western life, so we can expect common historic/host language usage to continue to shrink and be replaced with transplanted phrases. * Borrow words are only useful where the predominant language being used is still the host language. No doubt Maori would very seldom even use the word pirihimana and would likely use 'cops' or such. ie. even borrow words are being replaced by transplanted words.
* Once you use more than 50% transplanted phrases, you have, effectively, switched over to the new language.
It would appear that what we have passing for common Maori now is actually a flip of that – it is English with the odd Maori word or phrase transplanted into English. This is no longer really Maori at all, but rather a local English dialect.
Ndebele has 4 million people using it as a primary language every day. That will likely keep it going for the foreseeable future. Maori has probably less than 10,000 who could comfortably use Maori as a home language and probably less than half that who would actually choose to do so.
To resurrect a language like Maori is surely close to impossible. If it not in common use then it really has no chance at all beyond a historical curiosity.
