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?

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