Kia Ora and Shalom: Celebrating Indigenous Language Revival
The cover image, a greenstone Star of David, is courtesy of Justin Amler.
Last Friday concluded Hebrew Language Week. Since 2012, the birthday of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Hebrew’s modern revival, has been designated as a national holiday in Israel. This day has since been extended into a full week of celebration. The Academy of the Hebrew Language — Israel’s premier authority on all matters Hebrew — with the support of the Israeli government hosts and organizes lectures and events for the week to encourage a continued dialogue on the value of preserving, promoting, and progressing the use of Hebrew well into the future.
As the week’s festivities wrapped up, a perennial question remained for many in the Israeli public: what is the point of celebrating Hebrew? Israel enjoys a relatively high rate of literacy, and both the existence and day-to-day use of Hebrew are just facts of life. And the Academy? Most countries do not have such institutions set up to research and make decisions about how their language or languages should be used. In those few countries that do, Israel included, there are no shortage of detractors who say that these organizations do nothing to serve those who speak the language; that they only prescribe meaningless rules and hinder the language’s natural evolution.
There may be some truth in these criticisms. After all, it is the speakers of a language, not an institution, that give it life and purpose. Celebrating a language should ultimately be for the sake of the people who have given that language meaning and for whom that language gave them a sense of peoplehood in return.
The Hebrew language and it’s continued use in some form or another has accompanied the Jewish people throughout its thousands of years of history. Even after mass deportations following the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of Israel and later the ethnic cleansing of Judea at the hands of the Romans forced most Jews out of their ancestral homeland and into Diaspora communities, they kept their language. In exile from Israel, Hebrew as a spoken language diminished in favor of local tongues and became regulated almost exclusively to the realm of writing. It survived however as a symbol of Jewish identity and pride, as well as a connection to the homeland and the communities of Jews that continued to live there.
When Diaspora Jews began their return in earnest to Israel in late 19th century, it didn’t take long for Hebrew to establish itself once again as their common language. This resurgence of spoken Hebrew opened a new chapter in the indigenous history of the Jewish people as seen through its language — a history that spans the archaeological record in Israel arguably as far back as 1200 BCE and finds contemporary expression in the State of Israel and its Hebrew-speaking Jewish inhabitants.
On the other side of world, a comparable story unfolded. The language of the Māori, Aotearoa New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, developed on Aotearoa’s islands in isolation from the rest of Polynesia. Over the course of centuries, it diverged from other Eastern Polynesian tongues to form its own reo, language. The Māori language (te reo) and its many dialects at first did not serve to unify the whole of Māori culture. The Māori were and still are a distinctly tribal people, similar to the Israelites (the collective name for the Jews in Israel pre-Babylonian Exile). Unlike the Israelite tribes though, Māori iwi, tribes, functioned wholly separate from one another and generally kept to themselves. European settlement in Aotearoa however threatened complete assimilation of the Māori, and very much like Hebrew in the Jewish Diaspora, te reo became a vital link to ancestral homelands for all Māori. Over time, this indigenous connection between people and land would be even further tested.
The colonization of New Zealand in the early to mid-19th century saw the beginnings of te reo’s sharp decline. With the increasing arrival of settlers, missionaries, and traders to Aotearoa’s shores, the English language began to dominate all aspects of daily life in the interactions between Europeans and Māori. This linguistic shift was only hastened by the establishment of so-called native schools in Aotearoa. These schools were tasked under New Zealand law to teach English as part of a curriculum that aimed to phase out te reo both inside and outside of the classroom.
Less than a century later, it was becoming clear that te reo was at risk of disappearing altogether. Numbers of native speakers dwindled to less than 20 percent of the Māori population. Māori leadership began to take charge of recovering the language through initiatives such kōhanga reo, an early childhood language immersion program. These efforts were further bolstered by a Māori indigenous-rights movement that petitioned New Zealand’s parliament in 1972 to teach te reo in public schools. Since then, a national day and eventually, an entire week was established to celebrate and promote the Māori language: te Wiki o te Reo Māori.
As was the case with Hebrew in the modern State of Israel, the revitalization of the indigenous language of Aotearoa was recognized by the government through the founding and support of an institution dedicated to its research and proliferation: the Māori Language Commission. Like Israel’s Academy of the Hebrew Language, it exists first and foremost for the sake of the people who speak the language; to help maintain the bonds between a people and their ancestral homeland.
While not connected by time or place, the journeys of te reo Māori and Hebrew resonate with each other and speak of the universal yearning to discover and preserve identity. Even their most common greetings, shalom and kia ora, carry similar sentiments of wishing peace, health, and completeness for one another. As globalization threatens cultural assimilation and the slow erasure of indigenous culture in the developed and developing world, celebrating indigenous languages is becoming more than ever a matter of survival.
