Abstract:
For over 100 years, the status of te reo Māori was variously affected by various linguistic ideologies such as assimilation, which in turn led to such policies as English only in schooling. As a consequence, at the schooling level, the development of the language went into a hiatus for over 100 years, and at the macro-level, considerable language shift occurred to English, causing te reo Maori to become endangered. In response to the parlous state of the language, a range of initiatives were launched in the 1980s by Maori to revitalise the language—including Māori-medium schooling. To support the teaching of the school subjects in Māori-medium, there had to be rapid expansion of the lexicon. While at times very ad hoc, this paper will examine the various ideologies and tensions that have consistently underpinned this corpus development. For example, early lexical developments were largely driven by local schools and their communities, centred on the maintenance of their tribal dialects. In contrast, there was a strong belief among curriculum specialists for the need to standardise terms, particularly for teaching in secondary schools. The goal was to facilitate consistency and common interpretation of terms for use across the country and to raise the status of te reo Māori as the medium of instruction. Through the development of resources such as dictionaries, local word varieties were eliminated with the implicit intention of making the standardised form the preferred form in the belief this was the best strategy for supporting learning the school subjects nationally (Trinick, 2015).Thus, the prescriptive nature of standardisation and codification is a double-edged sword. At the community level, many iwi continue to hold strong views that the language of schooling should reflect their own dialects, including the desire for dialect-specific curriculum terms used in schools in their tribal area (Meaney, Trinick & Fairhall, 2012).
