He tangata whai kupu

NA KIM KNIGHT

I TE mimiti o nga reo taketake, ka tirohia e Kim Knight tetehi pukenga o Waikato kua huri ki te ipurangi hei whawhai mo te oranga o te reo Maori.

(A man who follows words. With minority languages in crisis, Kim Knight profiles a Waikato academic who has taken the fight to save te reo online.Translation of headline and standfirst courtesy of Te Taka Keegan)

Te Taka Keegan is, by his own definition, a language activist. Chained himself to any dictionaries lately? He laughs slightly awkwardly.

"In New Zealand, the word activist is associated with radical behaviour. But internationally, an activist is someone who doesn't just stand by and watch things happen. They get in and do something."

For Keegan, a Waikato University lecturer and computer scientist, that recently meant six months at Google headquarters, California, researching a new online translating toolkit, and its potential for use with minority languages.

Minority languages are in crisis, says Keegan. At a lecture last month, he delivered the scary statistics: 5% of fish are seriously endangered, 8% of plants, 11% of birds, 18% of mammals and 40% of languages.

"We do a lot of conservation work to ensure animal and plant species survive, but what do we do to ensure languages survive?"

Kia ora. Hui. Hikoi. Whanau. Once, newspapers would have followed these common words and phrases with English translations. In 1985, only 12% of Maori spoke te reo. Today, that figure has doubled. Sixteen percent of Maori children are educated in full language immersion settings. In Hamilton, Keegan's son plays rugby in a team coached totally in Maori. Keegan himself teaches a tertiary computer science class in te reo. But he's worried.

"I don't think Maori language is safe. It still seems to me we've got a long way to go."

For a minority language to survive, says Keegan, it must be used beyond "special occasions".

"We have to bring our language into all avenues of life. If we don't, then it will die. It will definitely die."

Maori Language Commissioner Erima Henare agrees. In a statement last week, he said complacency was the biggest enemy to language revitalisation.

"There is a perception that with the increased presence of Maori language on television, on the radio, and in schools, that the language is secure. However this is not the case ... of a population of 565,000 Maori people, there are only 18,000 fluent speakers. It's a very sobering statistic. What conclusion can be drawn other than to say the language is still in a perilous state?"

Tomorrow marks the start of Maori Language Week. Last year, Te Taka Keegan celebrated that with the release of Maori Google a project he became involved in eight years ago that means the search engine's home page can now be read in te reo.

Keegan's next goal: integrating Maori into the new Google translator toolkit, a system that allows humans to correct and edit automatic machine translations for 47 languages and then stores those improvements for future use.

Six months at Google headquarters and he hasn't quite cracked it. "There are still some things I want to confirm, but if we could have this tool, it would change the Maori language translation landscape.

"The theory is once somebody has translated a sentence, then that sentence is available to everyone... all the previous translations appear.

"At the moment we've got the likes of Maori Television in Auckland doing a whole bunch of translations and, say, the Ministry of Education in Wellington... everybody's working in isolation. This tool would allow them to all work together."

Yes, he says, it might cause debate. "But that's a really good thing. Being able to share and argue and tease things out. You end up with a better translation that everybody has accepted."

KEEGAN, 43, grew up with a Pakeha dad and a Maori mum. "I was born and raised in a Pakeha environment in the Taranaki, but we were always trudging back up to the Waikato to attend certain events and they were on the marae."

He went to Wellington to learn about computer hardware. Got a great job in Australia fixing computers. But inside, something was nagging.

"I realised my mother's side of the family was something I wanted to sit down and return to. I made an early decision that one of the ways to do that was to learn te reo Maori."

In his early 20s, he chucked in that good job "with lots of money" and enrolled in a full immersion university course.

"I remember saying to someone it was like living on the moon. You couldn't converse with anyone, there were people around you, but I had virtually nil language skills and that was kind of isolating."

One day, at a meeting, he realised he had understood almost everything a speaker had said. "And then one morning I woke up from a dream and realised that in my dream, everybody had been speaking Maori."

But, says Keegan, "you're always a student. You're always learning something, just like you're always learning in English."

And every so often, light bulbs still go off. "The last time, was a couple of months ago, when I was overseas with Google. To have a technology company actually really consider a minority language it's something quite different."

At company headquarters, he gave a speech and asked how many attendees spoke a second language. "Virtually everybody in the room put their hand up." When he asked how many spoke a minority language, all those hands went back down.

Keegan says if you can speak a language, you should be able to access information online, in that language. But why bother when, in this country, all Maori speakers are bilingual? "Why bother? Well then, why bother speaking our language at all. Let's all speak English. If we want our language to grow, we have to provide that online facility."

In 1972, 30,000 people signed a petition calling for the promotion of Maori language. Maori Language Week was born of that push.

"I've heard some people say we shouldn't have a week, we should have a whole year. And those of us who can, should. But for those people who don't have that opportunity, let's encourage them to use it during Maori Language Week."

And that usage, says the computer scientist, should be extended to include the online world.

"Our children are getting online and doing things online, let's make sure they can do that through the medium of their language. I'm someone with computing skills, I've got a doctorate in computer science, I can speak the Maori language if I can't help our language get into this avenue then nobody else will."

Te Taka Keegan: computer scientist and truly, a language activist.

Maori language milestones Pre-1840:

Maori is the language of Aotearoa New Zealand.

1850s: Pakeha becomes main language spoken.

1913: 90% of Maori school children are native Maori speakers.

1972: Petition calls for promotion of Maori language. September 14 established as first Maori language day.

1975: First Maori Language Week.

1978: Ruatoki School becomes first bilingual school.

1982: Te Kohanga Reo infant immersion schools open.

1985: Te Reo Maori claim brought before Waitangi Tribunal. Maori speakers estimated at 12% of population. Kura kaupapa Maori immersion schools for post-kohanga reo children open.

1986: Waitangi Tribunal recommends Maori language be used in law courts, and a supervising body established to foster language use.

1987: Maori Language Act passed. Maori declared an official language of New Zealand.

1989: Education Amendment Act provides formal recognition for kura kaupapa Maori and wananga (Maori tertiary institutions). Government reserves radio and television broadcasting frequencies for use by Maori.

1993: More than 20 iwi radio stations broadcasting. 1995: 8% of Maori adults are "highly fluent". Of those, one-third are aged over 60 years. He Taonga Te Reo (Maori Language Year) celebrated.

1997: Total of 675 kohanga reo and 30 developing kohanga reo cater to 13,505 children. There are 54 kura kaupapa Maori and three whare wananga. More than 32,000 students receive Maori medium education and another 55,399 learn the Maori language.

1998: Government announces funding for Maori television channel and $15m fund for community Maori language initiatives.

2001: Language health survey reveals approximately 136,700 Maori language speakers; 27% speak te reo fairly well, well or very well.

2004: Maori Television Service begins broadcasting March 28.

2005: 30th anniversary of Maori Language Week.

2008: Google Maori translated and launched. 2009: Maori Language Week theme Te Reo i te Hapori, Maori Language in the Community, July 27 - August 2.

Source: Maori Language Commission.

More information: www.koreromaori.co.nz

- © Fairfax NZ News