Annual Public Lecture

Bernard Spolsky
Rescuing Maori: the last 40 years

When: 6 pm, Thursday 26 February, 2009
Where: Room G52, SOAS, Russell Square, London ... location information

The Annual Public Lecture is organised by the Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Department of Linguistics, and is part of Endangered Languages Week 2009

Abstract

Forty years ago, nation-wide investigations sustained the feeling that the Maori language in New Zealand was dying. In most areas, the residue of native speakers was over the age of forty, and there were few children learning the language from their parents. Starting in the mid-1970s, a series of grass-roots language revival initiatives - Te Ataarangi (aimed at adult learners), Kohanga Reo (language nests in which grandparents cared for and spoke Maori to pre-school children), and Kura Kaupapa Maori (independent Maori-immersion primary schools) - were tried, and rapidly grew to reach a good proportion of Maoris. Accompanying ethnic revival and a political campaign seeking redress for failures to observe the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi by which Maori chiefs had ceded sovereignty to England in 1840, the language generation movement achieved official recognition, support for school programs, and provision of Maori radio and television. There have been major improvement in the numbers of speakers and of adults using the language with children, but it is still only spoken by less than a quarter of the Maori population and 4% of New Zealanders. In the last few years, enrolment in immersion programs is probably declining. Studying this case of the effort to rescue an endangered language makes clear the complexity and difficulty of the undertaking.

About Bernard Spolsky

Bernard Spolsky was born in New Zealand in 1932 and educated at Wellington College, Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand, and the University of Montreal. He taught at high schools in New Zealand, Australia and England. He taught English for two years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed military service in the Israel Defense Forces. He was assistant professor of Education at McGill University (1962-4), and assistant professor of Linguistics at Indiana University (1964-8). At the University of New Mexico from 1968-1980, he was Professor of Linguistics, Elementary Education and Anthropology and for six years Dean of the Graduate School.

He was appointed Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University in 1980, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1992-4 and Chair of the Department of English from 1995-6. On retirement in 2000, he was appointed Professor Emeritus.

At Indiana University, he was director of the English as a Foreign Language Program and associate chair of the Research Center for the Language Sciences. At the University of New Mexico, he directed the Navajo Reading Study. At Bar-Ilan University, he founded and directed the Language Policy Research Center.

He has been a Senior Associate at the National Foreign Language Center and Senior Research Scientist at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, both at the University of Maryland. He was Editor-in-Chief of the international academic journal Language Policy, published now by Springer Science from 2002 until 2007, and is Publications Director of Asian TEFL and editor-in-chief of its journal.

He is currently writing a book on language management. For more information please see Bernard Spolsky’s website.

Booking information