New Zealand is “racist as f**k”: Linguistic racism and te reo Māori

Abstract

A key feature of the confluence of modern nation-state formation and colonization has been the marginalization and denigration of minoritized language varieties, particularly Indigenous languages, over time. Indigenous languages have been actively proscribed in public language domains, such as education, leading to their inevitable shift and loss, in settler-colonial contexts worldwide. This process of linguistic hierarchization has long been recognized in the sociology of language and the sociology of nationalism but the overt and covert linguistic racism attendant upon it had remained relatively under-explored. Recent discussions within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, however, have addressed this lacuna, particularly through the development of raciolinguistics as a theoretical framework. Linguistic racism, a form of cultural racism, uses discursive constructions of language use and related linguistic hierarchies as a proxy for the racialized discrimination and subordination of Indigenous peoples and other minoritized ethnic groups. Here, I explore discourses of linguistic racism by Pākehā (White) New Zealanders in Aotearoa New Zealand toward te reo Māori, the Indigenous Māori language, in everyday discourses and the media. I focus particularly on the public contestation of the increasing normalization of te reo Māori in contemporary New Zealand society, the result of the successes of the last 40 years of Māori language revitalization, via both overt and covert forms of linguistic racism toward te reo Māori. These discourses act in defense of English monolingualism, the direct linguistic legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history, along with the privileges this history has provided for White, monolingual English-speaking New Zealanders. Interestingly, the racialized opposition to te reo Māori is most evident among older, White New Zealanders. This suggests the potential for change among younger New Zealanders and New Zealand’s increasingly diverse migrant population, both of whom appear more open to the ongoing development of societal bilingualism in English and te reo Māori.

In April 2018, the UK magazine, Dazed, featured a conversation between two well-known Indigenous Māori New Zealanders – the film director, Taika Waititi, and the musician, Ruban Nielson. Both grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1980s/1990s, found fame as adults after leaving the country, and now live in the US. During the discussion of their experiences of life in Aotearoa New Zealand, the following exchange between the interviewer and Waititi occurred:

Interviewer: I think I’ve got quite an idealized vision of New Zealand as like Australia without the racism and the blokeish sense of humor.

Waititi: Nah, it’s racist as f**k. I mean, I think New Zealand is the best place on the planet, but it’s a racist place. People just flat-out refuse to pronounce Māori names properly. There’s still [racial] profiling when it comes to Polynesians. It’s not even a color thing… ¹

Waititi’s comment generated considerable international media attention – no doubt, because of his increasing celebrity status at the time (it was just before his Hollywood blockbuster film Thor: Ragnarok was released in 2017). Meanwhile, back in Aotearoa New Zealand, the local media commentariat took swift and sharp umbrage – one prominent commentator even suggesting that Waititi’s observations amounted to ‘sabotage’. What was perhaps most striking about this reaction though – apart from the fact that it was primarily Pākehā (New Zealanders of European settler ancestry) who were incensed, a usual pattern of the minimization and/or denial of racism by whites (Doane and Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Van Dijk, 1993) – is that it was strikingly resonant of an earlier view of New Zealand’s race relations that had (many thought) long been debunked. In this view, Aotearoa New Zealand was (re)constructed as a shining exemplar of positive “race relations” between Pākehā settler and Indigenous Māori New Zealanders since the advent of colonization in the late 18th/early 19th century; a propitious – and, necessarily, historically elliptical – discourse that reached its zenith in the 1960s (Fleras and Spoonley, 1999; May, 2002).

Aotearoa New Zealand had apparently avoided the worst excesses of colonization of an Indigenous people, or so the story went, when in fact its history as a settler-colonial state differed only in degree, not substance, in relation to the marginalization of its Indigenous people over time (Chakma and Jenson, 2001). Initially, the signing of a landmark Treaty – The Treaty of Waitangi – in 1840 between Māori Chiefs and the British Crown augured well. The Treaty ostensibly guaranteed equal citizenship for Māori and the retention of their lands and natural resources as part of becoming a British Colony. However, the Treaty was quickly ignored by subsequent Pākehā-dominated colonial governments in their relentless quest for land for the burgeoning number of Pākehā settlers. The result was the usual deleterious effects of colonization visited upon Māori, including systemic racism, political disenfranchisement, misappropriation of land, population and health decline, educational disadvantage, and socioeconomic marginalization (Belich, 1996; King, 2003; Pack et al., 2015; Walker, 2004).

Te Reo Māori in New Zealand’s colonial history

For my purposes here, and returning to Waititi’s observation, this colonial history has also been characterized by a longstanding diminution, marginalization, and exclusion of te reo Māori (the Māori language) in public language domains – a consequence of a hierarchized relationship with English, the now dominant language in New Zealand (May and Hill, 2018). In the late 18th century and early 19th century, at the advent of colonization, Māori was the lingua franca, the language of trade, and the language of education. For example, early Mission schools (1816-1840s) taught through the medium of Māori, achieving high literacy rates in both Māori and English as a result (Simon and Smith, 2001). However, from the late 1840s education reverted to an overt assimilationist approach toward Māori and the concomitant privileging of English medium instruction. The rapid growth of Pākehā (predominantly English-speaking) settlers from the mid-19th century onward resulted in a similar societal shift to English over time, an entrenchment of (English) monolingualism, and a related pathologizing of ongoing Māori language use. Again, in education, the teaching of English was considered to be a central task of the school system, and te reo Māori was often regarded as the prime obstacle to the “progress” of Māori children (Benton 1981). As the Auckland Inspector of Native Schools, Henry Taylor, was to argue in 1862:

The Native language itself is also another obstacle in the way of civilisation, so long as it exists there is a barrier to the free and unrestrained intercourse which ought to exist between the two races [sic], it shuts out the less civilised portion of the population from the benefits which intercourse with the more enlightened would confer. The school-room alone has power to break down this wall of partition... (AJHR, E-4, 1862, pp. 35-38)

The inevitable result of this widespread pejorative view of te reo Māori, within what Liddicoat (2013) aptly describes as the establishment of linguistic “hierarchies of prestige”, led to the marginalization of te reo Māori within educational and other public language domains and, over the course of the 20th century, its subsequent language shift and loss. The rapid urbanization of Māori since the Second World War – which saw Māori move from being a 90% rural population to 80% urban in less than 20 years – has also been a key contributory factor to this precipitous language decline. While the Māori language had long been excluded from the realms of the school, it had still been nurtured in largely rural Māori communities. Urbanization was to change all that. Thus, in 1930, a survey of Māori children estimated that 96.6% spoke only Māori at home. By 1960, only 26% spoke Māori. By 1979 the Māori language had retreated to the point where language death was predicted (Benton 1979, 1981; May, 2018). It is this context of rapid language loss that galvanized the Māori language revitalization movement from the early 1980s onward, and which has since seen the beginnings of what Paulston (1993, p. 281) has described as “language reversal”; a process by which “one of the languages of a state begins to move back into more prominent use”.

Māori language revitalization

The Māori language revitalization movement in its initial stages focused on two key issues. The first was to ensure its legislative recognition as an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand, which was achieved with the passing of the Māori Language Act (1987). The second was to (re)embed te reo Māori as a language of instruction in schools by establishing Māori-medium education throughout early childhood education and subsequently compulsory schooling over the course of the1980s/1990s. In this latter regard, the Māori language revitalization movement has come to be regarded internationally as an exemplar of successful Indigenous language education (May, 2023a; May and Hill, 2018). Graduates of Māori-medium education have since entered the workforce over the last decade or so, contributing to the growing visibility and use of te reo Māori in public language domains, such as education, the media, and, increasingly, the workplace (Berardi-Wiltshire and Bortolotto, 2022). The advent of Māori Television in 2004 has further contributed to the ongoing normalization of te reo Māori (Nemec, 2017), as has its increased use in other media contexts, notably, radio, of which more shortly.

At the macro level of status language planning, there has been a concomitant policy shift in the approach to Māori language revitalization. Initially, Māori language policy, via key state agencies such as Te Puni Kōkiri (Ministry of Māori Development) and Te Taura Whiri i te reo Māori (Māori Language Commission), was focused on te reo Māori as a taonga (treasure), guaranteed under The Treaty of Waitangi, that first needed to be reclaimed by (and for) Māori. The genesis of Māori-medium education in the 1980s/1990s was clearly predicated on this position, as were subsequent emphases in the 2000s on fostering intergenerational language transmission among whānau (family) and iwi (tribal) contexts (Office of the Minister of Māori Affairs, 2014; Waitangi Tribunal, 2010). In more recent years, attention in Māori language policy has turned to a language revitalization approach that increasingly encompasses non-Māori learners and speakers as well (Higgins and Rewi, 2014; Higgins et al., 2014). The latter emphasizes the renormalizing of te reo Māori in wider New Zealand society, along with the increased instrumental benefits of using the language that (will) result (Te Huia, 2020). A key component of this renormalization process is a related need to foster greater “tolerability” (May, 2012) among non-Māori New Zealanders toward te reo Māori (Albury, 2016; De Bres, 2008, 2015).

And it seems to be having some positive effects, albeit still in nascent form. Despite the colonial history of linguistic marginalization and denigration of te reo Māori, more favorable attitudes to the language in wider New Zealand society are clearly beginning to emerge, particularly among the younger generations (Albury, 2015, 2016; Te Puni Kōkiri, 2010). The latter also includes the burgeoning number of migrants to Aotearoa New Zealand post-1990s, predominantly from Asia. In contradistinction to the earlier predominance of English-speaking migrants from Commonwealth countries, these more recent migrants are often bi/multilingual and thus potentially more open to learning te reo Māori as an additional language (De Bres, 2010, 2015; Nemec, 2017; RSNZ, 2013).

In addition to Māori-medium education, as the key initial driver of language revitalization, the use of te reo Māori is increasingly visible within mainstream (English-medium) schooling, albeit still with a high degree of variability. There is also growing support among the wider population for making te reo Māori compulsory at primary (elementary) school level. An attitudes survey, undertaken by Statistics New Zealand in 2021, highlighted 62% in favor of this development, while in the same survey 57% supported the notion that the state should encourage and support the use of te reo in everyday situations (Ruru, 2022). These changing attitudes toward te reo Māori are also clearly reflected in the surge in enrolments for adult te reo Māori courses, with the majority of these learners now being non-Māori (Berardi-Wiltshire and Bortolotto, 2022; O’Toole, 2020).

These developments are also in accord with the latest iteration of Māori language policy, outlined in Maihi karauna: Strategy for Māori language revitalisation (Te Puni Kōkiri, 2019). Reflecting the recent shift in emphasis toward the increasing normalization of te reo Māori in wider New Zealand society, the policy asserts that it is the state’s responsibility to create “the right conditions across government and Aotearoa New Zealand society for the revitalisation of te reo Māori” (p. 7). To this end, the policy outlines two key goals. The first is that “[b]y 2040, one million New Zealanders (or more) [one-fifth of the current population] will have the ability and confidence to talk about at least basic things in te reo Māori” (p. 12). The second is that, by that time, at least 85% of New Zealanders will value te reo Māori as a key part of (their) national identity. This growing emphasis on at least some minimal competence in te reo Māori, along with its links to a bicultural national identity, is also becoming increasingly apparent in the adoption and promotion of te reo Māori in a wide range of key public and private sector workplaces (see Berardi-Wiltshire and Bortolotto, 2022; Holmes and Vine, 2021).

But returning to Waititi’s comment, which prefaced this article, there remains a strong residual antagonism toward te reo Māori among a certain portion of the New Zealand population, a small but vociferous and politically well-organized group comprising predominantly Pākehā, older, monolingual English speakers. And, as with their colonial forebears, their antagonism often continues to be expressed in highly racialized terms.

Linguistic racism: The legacies of colonialism and nation-building

As the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand attests, the marginalization and denigration of te reo Māori is part of a wider process of linguistic hierarchization, which has evolved from the confluence of colonialism and nation-state formation over the last few centuries (Anderson, 1991; Bauman and Briggs, 2003; Gellner, 1983; May, 2012, 2016). In conjunction, this has led to the primacy of establishing a common “national” (settler) language – in this case, English – at the specific expense of its Indigenous language. In the process, English as New Zealand’s de facto national language has come to be associated with modernity and (social and economic) mobility. Meanwhile, te reo Māori has historically been associated with tradition and obsolescence – as antediluvian/premodern, fit only for the purposes of cultural maintenance, if that. This form of linguistic social Darwinism is a common feature of modern nation-state building worldwide, with its resolute focus on establishing linguistic homogeneity, most often via public monolingualism, as the ‘price’ of (national) citizenship (De Schutter, 2007; Gramling, 2016; May, 2017a). The result of this quest for linguistic homogeneity is the negative ascription of minoritized language varieties, particularly Indigenous languages, and their effective banishment from public language domains (May, 2023a).

Academic contributions to discussions of language rights and linguistic justice have long acknowledged these historical processes of nation-building, their reinforcement within settler colonial contexts, and their cumulative deleterious impacts on Indigenous and other minoritized languages (see May, 2012; Mowbray, 2012; Piller, 2016). However, the racialized views associated with this malign confluence of factors have borne less academic scrutiny, at least until recently. A key reason for this lies in the fact that the sociological, legal, and educational literature on racism in the late 20th century, including the origins of Critical Race Theory (CRT), was primarily preoccupied with color racism and/or the Black/White binary (Grosfoguel, 2016). This is not to understate the ongoing importance/significance of color racism (Fredrickson, 2016; Lipsitz, 2011). However, as Darder and Torres (2002, p.246) argue, in their sometimes-critical discussion of the origins of CRT, what is needed instead is ”a critical language and conceptual apparatus” that, while still foregrounding racism and racial inequality, simultaneously encompasses ”multiple social expressions of racism” (p. 260). In light of this, CRT has since moved to adopt and engage with the notion of ‘political race’. This notion reframes race as a concept that denotes both social location and political commitment. In so doing, it can also then be used to build inclusive agendas that begin with the issues and concerns of communities of color but which are also expanded, at least potentially, to address class, gender, linguistic and other inequalities (Grosfoguel, 2016; Guinier and Torres, 2002; Han and Laughter, 2019).

These developments in CRT are consonant with the prior recognition of what the British cultural and media commentator Martin Barker (1981) first termed “new racism”. Barker argued that more covert forms of racism focused increasingly on cultural “differences” (see also May, 2009; Modood, 2013; Van Dijk, 1993). In this process, essentialist racialized discourses are “disguised” by describing group differences principally in cultural and/or historical terms without specifically mentioning “race” or overtly racial criteria. New racisms, in this sense, are a form of ethnicism which, as Brah (1992) describes it,

defines the experience of racialized groups primarily in “culturalist” terms: that is, it posits “ethnic difference” as the primary modality around which social life is constituted and experienced. . . . This means that a group identified as culturally different is assumed to be internally homogeneous . . . ethnicist discourses seek to impose stereotypic notions of common cultural need upon heterogeneous groups with diverse social aspirations and interests. (p. 129)

Parallel sociological discussions in US academia on the emergence of new forms of racism have also focused on the increasing role and influence of cultural racisms, albeit without reference to these initial international discussions of the phenomena (Bonilla-Silva, 2003, 2022; Kohli et al., 2017). Cumulatively, the growing analysis of cultural racisms in all its forms also lends itself to a more direct and critical analysis of the interplay of language and racism, or linguistic racism (Kroskrity, 2020) – a focus that has become increasingly prominent within sociolinguistics over the last decade or so. Linguistic racism, as Kroskrity (2020) describes it, constitutes “racist and racializing acts and/or projects that use linguistic resources as a means of discrimination and subordination” (p. 68). Alim’s (2016) notion of “languaging race” – “theorizing race through the lens of language” (p.7) is also consistent with this position. Both Kroskrity and Alim highlight in their analyses the need to move beyond a focus on overt forms of linguistic racism (e.g. racist epithets and slurs) to address “covert” forms of linguistic racism displayed in everyday usage (see also Hill, 2008). This shifts the emphasis from the propositional content of language, such as racist vocabulary, to a broader examination of the role and influence of social indexicality in the construction of racist discourses. In this way, racial categories are understood as being discursively produced (and reproduced) in everyday linguistic interactions.

More recent sociolinguistic work in what has come to be termed “raciolinguistics” (Rosa, 2019; Rosa and Flores, 2017, 2020) (re)connects these racialized discursive practices directly to processes of settler colonialism and the linguistic hierarchies attendant upon them. Rosa and Flores (2020) argue, for example, that while “raciolinguistic ideologies differ in some ways across conventionally defined colonial and postcolonial contexts, these various settings are characterized by the ideological assumption that racialized subjects’ language practices are unfit for legitimate participation in a modern world” (p. 93). The confluence of nation-state/colonial governmentality has thus relied on raciolinguistic ideologies to consistently position colonized (Indigenous) populations, and their language use, as inferior to idealized European populations. As they conclude:

Raciolinguistic ideologies that organized these colonial relations continue to shape the world order in the postcolonial era by framing racialized subjects’ language practices as inadequate for complex thinking processes needed to navigate the global economy on the one hand, and as targets of anxieties about authenticity and purity on the other. Contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies must be understood within this broader history of European colonialism. (2020, pp. 92-93).

Discourses of linguistic racism toward te reo Māori

It is within this raciolinguistic framework that we can now examine ongoing discourses of linguistic racism in Aotearoa New Zealand toward te reo Māori. In what follows, I highlight three examples. The first of these can be found in Wetherell and Potter (1992) who examined everyday racist discourses toward Māori (and te reo Māori) by Pākehā New Zealanders. Grounded in the social psychology of racism, and via the use of discourse analysis, Wetherell and Potter highlight the persistence of essentialist racist tropes by Pākehā of Māori, reflecting the still entrenched racial (and linguistic) hierarchies of New Zealand’s colonial history. While these constitutive discourses of racism proved to be wide-ranging in their points of focus, they do include specific reference to the supposed limitations of te reo Māori, as in the following interview.

Example 1: (Wetherell and Potter, 1992, pp. 186-188)

That’s why I actually object to them bringing massive Māori culture curricula into schools etc. (yeah). To a certain extent, because I do feel that this doesn’t equip them for the modern world at all…. Because what’s the use of being able to speak Māori if you can only speak it to a limited number of people (yeah) in a limited area and it has no use in the actual, you know, in the real world, as it were, if you’ll pardon the expression.

….

I’ve got nothing against the Māori people … I’ve got many friends that are good Māori people, but I find the Māori language of no use really, now it may be part of their heritage but I’m not buying that (yes) because in say the year 2020 or whatever we won’t be worried about speaking the Māori language. We’ll be worried about speaking … if anything we’ll be speaking French or German or Japanese or something else because they are the people, they are the countries we are trading with (yes) and to trade successfully we must be able to speak the language.”

Wetherell and Potter identify these interview responses as part of a broader pushback against the expansion of te reo Māori – at that time, still within the first decade of Māori language revitalization and the re-establishment of Māori-medium education. Discourses of individual rights, egalitarianism, practical rationality, and history as progress are deployed by the Pākehā New Zealanders interviewed against the use/expansion of te reo Māori and English-Māori bilingualism. A key theme highlighted here is the notion of linguistic utility, which is conceived as, firstly, dependent on the number of speakers – with fewer speakers suggesting less utility. However, this is precisely what Māori language revitalization is trying to address – expanding the number of speakers and increasing its visibility in key language domains. As such, a second discursive move is employed to counter this – constructing linguistic utility in primarily economistic terms. This instrumental understanding of language specifically privileges languages of trade, while at the same time eliding language usefulness with international reach/influence. By extension, bi/multilingualism is only seen as valuable if it involves such supposedly elite languages while the advantages of everyday English/Māori bilingualism “in the real world” of everyday New Zealand life are simply ignored. There is also a particular irony here in relation to the projected nature of New Zealand society in 2020, since currently English and Māori remain the two most widely spoken languages – the latter, the specific result of te reo Māori’s successful language revitalization (May and Hill 2018; May, 2023a). Meanwhile, French (6^th) German (9^th), and Japanese (17^th) have been in consistent decline as heritage languages, and as subjects in New Zealand schools, since the 1990s (Ministry for Ethnic Affairs, 2022).

A second key example of linguistic racism toward te reo Māori centers on its burgeoning use in New Zealand’s largest publicly funded radio station – Radio New Zealand (RNZ). RNZ is equivalent to other public radio broadcasters internationally, such as National Public Radio in the United States, and its morning news program, Morning Report (MR), is one of its flagship programs. Over the course of 2016-2017, one of MR’s two presenters, Guyon Espiner, a Pākehā New Zealander, increasingly incorporated the use of te reo Māori into the MR program – a result, in turn, of his own growing fluency in the language. In an interview with Espiner in 2021, he described these developments to me as follows:

I think what I started to do was just starting to increase [the use of te reo Māori], and add to it, and go, I know how to tell the time in Māori now, I know how to do the weather, I’m going to use the [correctly pronounced] Māori place names, I’m going to put the temperatures and the numbers in …. then I started to be “how can I weave in te reo Māori for these broadcasts?”... How do I say “coming up on the program” you know, because it’s a thing you always say, “e haere ake nei”, coming up, then it would be “e haere ake nei i tēnei hotaka”, coming up on this program. And then it would be “ko te tūmanako kua whai mai koe”, hope you’ll join us…. [So] I spent a lot of time over a couple of years working out how to weave more and more [te reo Māori] in, and then we got to the stage where we did do a couple of interviews, bilingual interviews live on air, which I thought was cool and was fun, and at times you know, we’d weave quite a bit of reo into the show… (Interview with Guyon Espiner, 5 May, 2021)

What surprised Espiner at the time though was the vocal and overtly racist resistance to these developments:

There was a big visible pushback.… So at the top of the hour when you do an extended greeting, you could look at the text machine and see ten or eleven gratuitously racist messages come in … and then you might have as many emails…. You’d get handwritten letters too, furious, from people who’d switched off. “This is Māorification”, if that’s even a word, and that would gather some steam…. so the pushback was fairly intense…. Some of them complained to the CEO, where they tied up our legal team with BSA [Broadcasting Standards Authority] complaints, made complaints that I should be sacked…. I would regularly get told to go and work for a Māori radio station…. I’d get people saying, is he going to turn up with a spear? like just out of the 1940s or something. You know, like, extraordinary stuff. Or what is this gibberish … highly offensive and personalized stuff, and deeply racist stuff.

Espiner alludes here to a coordinated campaign against these developments – with a raft of complaints submitted between 2016 and 2021 to the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) about the use of te reo Māori on RNZ and other media. It was only in March 2021, in fact, that the BSA finally decided that it would no longer consider complaints about te reo Māori on radio and television (Matthews, 2021). As Espiner observes of this:

…along that journey, we had a number of quite serious attempts at interventions. We had the BSA complaints, which have just [recently] been ruled as inadmissible, which I think is a very good move. How on earth you could make a complaint about an official language being used is beyond me, and thankfully they decided to completely throw them out.

The apogee of this campaign against the use of te reo on RNZ however, occurred much earlier – toward the end of 2017, with Don Brash, a former conservative politician and spokesperson for the group Hobson’s Pledge, fronting this opposition. Hobson’s Pledge is a conservative advocacy group that is consistently opposed to the recognition of any specific rights or representation for Māori, including the recognition and use of te reo Māori. The organization draws directly on the phrase “he iwi tahi tātou” (“we are all one people”), supposedly spoken by the representative of the British Crown, William Hobson, at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Hobson’s Pledge deploys this phrase as a proxy for “one law for all” to advocate vociferously for civic universalism and against biculturalism (and bilingualism). In so doing, New Zealand’s abject colonial history, along with the resulting dominance of the Pākehā ethnic group in the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic domains, is once again conveniently ignored.

Given the furore about the use of te reo Māori on RNZ, and Hobson’s Pledge’s visible role in fomenting opposition to these developments, Don Brash was interviewed in December 2017 by Kim Hill, another key RNZ presenter on the topic.

Example 2

(Radio New Zealand Interview by Kim Hill with Don Brash, December 2017)

Hill: Good, let us speak of te reo [Māori]. What is it that you don’t like about it on the radio?

Brash: Well I only don’t like it when it’s used in [a] primarily English language broadcasting medium such as RNZ. I turn on the RNZ news at 6 [am] to hear Morning Report and I have to listen to a couple of sentences … in te reo.

Hill: Does that worry you?

Brash: Yes it does.

Hill: Why?

Brash: … the reality is that the vast majority of New Zealanders speak primarily English, the number of people who speak primarily Māori is probably zero and we are being forced to listen to these sentences … without any trace of translation provided.

....

Māori have a lot of opportunity to listen to their language if they wish to do so…. you have got 21 Māori radio stations you can listen to, why should I have to?

Why should I listen to Māori? I don’t speak Māori, I went to school at a time when Māori was not taught.

English is the only international language. For New Zealand, it is the most important single language no matter what your cultural background. If you don’t understand English you are not going to make it in life.

Hill: If we are talking about culture then learning [te reo] Māori is not necessarily going to get you a job with the world bank, but it might make you more of a New Zealander. Does that matter?

Brash: Yes and I think for that reason if people want to learn te reo that is good. I don’t want to learn te reo it has no value to me at all.

….

Hill: Te reo is offered in most schools now. Is that a good thing?

Brash: I say it can be but it is an unhelpful thing if it crowds out things which could be more useful to New Zealanders…. Why would you learn something which for most people in New Zealand would never be more than a cultural value?.... Why not learn a language which will actually be useful to you?

Hill: Your idea of utility feels very harsh Dr Brash. We live in Aotearoa. We colonized Aotearoa. We stopped the inhabitants from speaking their language and now we are learning to appreciate it. What is wrong with that?

We see here a number of key racialized discursive moves made by Brash. Again, the notion of the number of speakers is used to delegitimize te reo Māori vis-à-vis English. A related move is to insist that because everyone speaks English, even if they also speak te reo Māori, then there is no need to support/maintain the latter. Concomitantly, the need to know/use English is elided with English monolingualism – a language replacement ideology, arising out of the linguistic homogeneity imperative of modern nation-state formation, which underpins arguments for dominant national languages and against the maintenance of minoritized and/or Indigenous languages (May, 2012, 2016, 2023a, b).

In opposing the use of te reo Māori in schools, Brash again invokes a linguistic hierarchy of prestige (Liddicoat, 2013) in relation to other supposedly higher-status languages, ignoring the everyday (bilingual) benefits of using te reo Māori by reducing it to a mere cultural artifact. His unwillingness to acknowledge, let alone embrace, te reo Māori on radio and in schools also highlights, perhaps unwittingly, the generational differences toward te reo Māori, discussed previously. Hobson’s Pledge, which he publicly represents, comprises predominantly older, Pākehā New Zealanders who went to school, and engaged with media, at a time when te reo Māori was still largely invisibilized and when English monolingualism was the unquestioned societal norm. New Zealand’s recent, slow, and still uneven move toward a more overtly bicultural and bilingual society, in line with the Treaty of Waitangi’s original intentions, remains for them an existential threat to the ongoing dominance of Pākehā ethnic and linguistic norms in New Zealand society.

This broader lack of engagement with te reo Māori by those who oppose its increasing normalization is also reflected in a related reluctance to pronounce Māori words correctly, as Waititi highlighted in the interview that began this article. Again, older Pākehā New Zealanders, when they did encounter te reo Māori growing up – primarily, in relation to place names – did so only in relation to their Anglicized variants. Espiner mentioned previously the importance of pronouncing Māori place names correctly. He also went on to highlight that many oppositional responses to the increased use of te reo Māori by RNZ also focused on this issue. Many responses not only decried the use of te reo Māori but also simultaneously argued that the continued mispronunciation of Māori words was legitimate because it was simply an artifact of their Anglicization in New Zealand English (see also De Bres, 2010). As Espiner concludes, “effectively their argument is ‘Well I’ve f**ked it up for so many decades that now this is the way we say it. Oh that’s just the way we say it.’ Well who decided that? Did you get permission to do that?”

The third example of linguistic racism drawn upon here is from a recent opinion piece by a well-known New Zealand newspaper columnist, Joe Bennett. Bennett, like Brash, is a monolingual English speaker. Again, the target of the commentary is RNZ’s use of te reo Māori.

Example 3

Joe Bennett; Media Commentator – Otago Daily Times: May 1, 2022

She's well into her 70s, lives alone, has a science degree or two, speaks her mind… reads three books a week, is a lifelong socialist and she shins up ladders to pick plums, when she can’t, that is, get a passing newspaper columnist to do it for her. And it was while the passing newspaper columnist was up the ladder a few weeks back that she said, a propos of I can no longer remember what, that she couldn’t be bothered with RNZ National anymore because of all the Māori nonsense.

What could possibly be going on? This called for research…. As I drove away from Ms Plum’s I tuned into [RNZ] National out of curiosity. It was lunchtime and the announcer was speaking at a breathless rate about the news of the day. As she did so she dropped into and out of the Māori language in a way I have never heard anyone do in actual life. This was more than the odd “kia ora”. There would be several sentences in a row in te reo, often at the start of an item. But when an interview began or an item of news was conveyed, she reverted to English.

The effect of the announcer’s speech was disconcerting. As an English speaker, I had to sieve what I heard, distinguishing what I understood from what I didn’t. It did not make for relaxed listening, and I understood the misgivings of Ms. Plum.

…..

Have the people at Radio New Zealand thought this through? I fear not. Do I really need to explain how language works? I fear so.

Languages exist for one reason only — to communicate meaning. To this end they evolve with time and what is useful endures and what is not withers. And that’s it. That’s the inevitable, immutable, blind process, and nothing we say or do will alter it.

The RNZ National announcer appeared to be speaking a new and hybrid tongue, part te reo, part English. In reality, she was speaking English — the language she used to convey meaning — and she was dropping in chunks of te reo for a moral or political purpose. And language evolution scoffs at moral or political purposes.

In short, she was wasting her time. In doing so she was alienating Ms. Plum, educating no one, patronizing Maoridom and barking up a barren linguistic plum tree.

Ironically, given its overtly condescending tone, this final example exhibits a remarkable lack of knowledge of how language actually works, highlighting often-entrenched misconceptions about bi/multilingualism among monolingual speakers (May, 2017b). Bi/multilinguals regularly engage in codeswitching and/or translanguaging as they traverse the various languages in their linguistic repertoires – there is nothing unusual about this (Canagarajah, 2013; Garcia and Li, 2014; MacSwan, 2022, May and Caldas, 2023). Meanwhile, the reduction of languages to (mere) modes of communication is predicated on a monolingual ideology that inevitably privileges English in this context, while assuming that language (use) is largely independent of identity (May, 2012, 2014). Bilingualism in both English and te reo Māori, along with the maintenance of linguistic diversity more broadly, thus comes to be constructed as an obstacle to communication in New Zealand’s English language-dominant society, rather than an expansion of it. Meanwhile, the goal of (retaining) English monolingualism – a key legacy of New Zealand’s racialized colonial settler history – is usefully reasserted by those monolingual Pākehā who have benefited most from it.

Conclusion

Linguistic racism is often linked directly with other examples of overt racism, as Espiner’s experiences of the backlash to his use of te reo Māori on RNZ and Taika Waititi’s initial linking of negative attitudes to reo Māori and racial profiling both highlight. However, linguistic racism also operates at covert levels, framed within instrumental conceptions of language, which reduce languages to their communicative purposes only. Instrumental understandings of language thus bifurcate the communicative and identity aspects of language use, ignoring the significance of the latter for both Indigenous and majority language speakers. This covertly racialized discursive move inevitably establishes and/or reinforces English's communicative dominance as the national language in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the current world language, while simultaneously ignoring that its communicative reach is the sociohistorical and sociopolitical (settler-colonial) product of the language domains it has come to dominate over time. Meanwhile, this process of bifurcation serves to cloak the identity functions that English performs for its often monolingual speakers. Despite framing their arguments in solely instrumental terms, it is clear that English for them is important for reasons of their (monolingual) linguistic identity construction as well.

The other key covert discursive move evident here is the presumption that the promotion and support of (public) bilingualism in English and te reo Māori – or, for that matter, any combination of majority/minority and/or Indigenous languages (see May, 2012, 2023a, 2023b) – is somehow an illiberal imposition on monolingual dominant language speakers. Like Brash and Bennett (and Bennett’s Ms Plum), these Pākehā monolingual English speakers thus regularly invoke the individual right to “opt out” of becoming bilingual in te reo Māori and English. In so doing, they argue that bilingualism in other supposedly more prestigious languages would be preferable, although, for most, their ongoing monolingualism betrays this as a largely rhetorical discursive move.

Likewise, when te reo Māori opponents actively contest the increasing expansion and renormalization of te reo Māori in New Zealand society, they ironically undermine one of their core arguments - that te reo Māori has little or no linguistic use(fulness). In effect, opposition to Māori language revitalization is a tacit admission of the significant, if still uneven, progress the movement has made over the last 40 years in establishing te reo Māori once again as a language of public use in Aotearoa New Zealand. As Espiner succinctly notes, “it's only no use if no one uses it”. Opponents of te reo Māori simply cannot have it both ways – deriding an Indigenous language for its supposed lack of utility, and then opposing its increased utility when it proves to be socially and politically inconvenient. Thus, the linguistic racism still directed toward te reo Māori can be seen for what it is, a vestigial attachment – still clearly tightly held by some – of the country’s colonial settler history in which the Pākehā ethnic majority came to exercise an unquestioned dominance over the construction of New Zealand’s cultural and linguistic norms. As te reo Māori (re)emerges from the shadows of that colonial legacy, particularly for New Zealand’s younger and increasingly linguistically diverse generations, those days may eventually be consigned to (that) history.