In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about what we’ve been up to in 2022 (much travel for Gretchen, with linguistic impressions of Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand!) and what’s coming up for 2023 (a second tiny human, er, longitudinal language acquisition project for Lauren, which means you’ll get a few more interview episodes from Gretchen’s travels).

We also talk about our favourite linguistics paper that we read in 2022 slash possibly ever: okay, yes, academic papers don’t typically do this, but this paper has spoilers, so we STRONGLY recommend reading it yourself here before listening to this episode, or check out the sample paragraph on the Patreon post. 

Listen to this episode about our 2023 plans and get access to many more bonus episodes - including our upcoming liveshow! - by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 31 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and I’m here with Dr. Ake Nicholas, who is a lecturer in linguistics at Massey University of New Zealand in Auckland and a speaker of Cook Islands Māori. Hello! Welcome!

Ake: Hello! 

Gretchen: Welcome to the show! I’m so pleased that we managed to make this line up with me being in Australia and you also visiting Australia. And so the Canadian and the New Zealander will be sitting in a room together talking about language and linguistics.

Ake: Very convenient.

Gretchen: So let’s start with the question that we ask all our guests on Lingthusiasm – how did you get into linguistics?

Ake: Well, if you go back enough into my early life, I’ve got a quite cute life story about that. So my family heritage is from the Cook Islands, which we’ll talk more about in a minute. And when I was a baby, my parents moved back there, and I lived there until I was about 6 years old, which was after I had started school. And so when we moved to New Zealand when I was about 6, I had a little bit of language-adjustment issues coming into an English-medium school, and cultural differences, and migration trauma, and all the rest of it. I got taken pity on by a teacher who wasn’t my teacher, but she was another teacher in the school who was New Zealand Māori. And she pulled me aside one day and said, “Oh, you know that your language is quite a lot like our language? Why don’t you sing me a song and we talk about it?” And so I sang a song for her and we went through the things that were the same and the things that were different. And she told me how it worked in New Zealand Māori, and it was – you know.

Gretchen: That’s so lovely.

Ake: At the age of 6, I was like “Something very exciting is happening here with these languages and these things.” And I was also extremely grateful to her for doing this nice, kind thing and making me feel good about it and not feel stink about wanting to use a different language. “Feel stink” – that’s quite a New Zealandism, isn’t it?

Gretchen: I guess so!

Ake: At that tender age, I became aware of this thing about relationships between languages, and the powerfulness that using a different language makes in your social world, and all that kind of stuff. I was very meta-aware of it from a young age. Also, my parents were really involved in the Kōhanga Reo movement in New Zealand, which is the reasonably well-known language revitalisation method of language immersion preschools.

Gretchen: Oh, is that the language nests?

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas

When a language is shifting from being spoken by a whole community to being spoken only by older people, it’s crucial to get the kids engaged with the language again. But kids don’t always appreciate the interests of their elders, especially when global popular culture seems more immediately exciting. One idea? Make stories from pop culture, featuring characters like Dumbledore and Batman, but in the local language.  

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Ake Nicholas, a linguist and native speaker of Cook Islands Māori, the lesser known relative of New Zealand Māori. Ake combines her her work as a Lecturer at Massey University, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa, University of New Zealand, with having her students create resources for young Cook Islands Maori learners, especially video stories from pop culture. We also talk about Kōhanga Reo, or language nests, a method for language revitalization that was first developed for New Zealand Māori and has spread around the world, and the social situations around Cook Islands Māori and New Zealand Māori. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode is about how people in the media know how to pronounce names correctly. It’s an interview with Tiger Webb, who makes the pronunciation guide for the ABC, recorded at our liveshow in Sydney. We get enthusiastic about words, style guides, emoji and more! Lauren and Tiger also quiz Gretchen on whether she’s learned any Australianisms on her visit to Australia, and Gretchen fires back with a few Canadianisms of her own. Feel like you’re in a cosy room of friendly linguistics enthusiasts by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and 26 more bonus episodes. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Dr. Ake Nicholas’s academic website and twitter
• Cook Islands on a global map and close-up map of the Cook Islands (Wikipedia)
• Kōhanga Reo / language nest
• Documenting and Describing Cook Islands Māori (75 min talk by Ake on youtube)
• Ake’s Language Contexts article about the social context of Cook Islands Māori (pdf)

Resources: 

• Student projects from Ake’s course on Cook Islands Māori
  
• Kōrero Rorouira - resources for doing digital storytelling projects for Cook Islands Māori
• A video story in Cook Islands Māori produced by Ake’s students, involving Dumbledore/Tampiritoa and other characters  
  
• Cook Islands Māori in archives: Paradisec, Ger Lingo 
  
• Ko te Karāma o te Reo Māori o te Pae Tonga o Te Kuki Airani: A Grammar of Southern Cook Islands Māori (Ake’s PhD thesis) 
  
• Development of Natural Language Processing Tools for Cook Islands Māori
  

News articles: 

• Cook Islands News: Batman to rescue of our language
  
• An article about Ake’s work in Education Gazette
• An article about Ake’s work in Ingenio Magazine
  
• At home with Dame Naida Glavish: the woman who said ‘kia ora’ instead of ‘hello’
• NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says daughter will be raised speaking Māori language and English
  
• Posts about Cook Islands and New Zealand Māori on All Things Linguistic

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).