@jayeless Interesting. I wonder to myself about the trajectory of the Māori language both between European contact and now and also into the future. As increasing numbers of non-native speakers learn and start to use Māori I feel certain it’ll change well beyond what Māori people might want for it. Language is so fascinating…

@jayeless oh, very interesting, thanks for writing and sharing. I am endlessly fascinated by idea of pidgin and creole languages. I find the adaptability of human communication amazing.

@Miraz That's an interesting issue! After all, English is under no threat from non-natives speaking the language their own way, but in the case of Māori there is a colonial dynamic and the fact that native speakers have the potential to be vastly outnumbered by learners. I think similar situations have cropped up in other revival efforts – like I had a Swiss tutor at uni who was talking about Romansh, and how the Swiss government's efforts to create resources and promote the language were displacing the actual dialects spoken by the villagers who spoke Romansh natively in the first place. I think Irish has seen similar issues too, as non-natives who learnt it at school now vastly outnumber native Irish speakers. A balance definitely has to be struck between "authenticity", as I guess you could describe it, and the necessity to invest in language revival to prevent them falling out of use entirely.

@tkoola Thank you! And absolutely, I also love learning about the many ways we use language to communicate with one another. Its flexibility is awesome.

@jayeless Māori has that added complication that will have affected other ‘revival' languages you mention, that colonialism almost wiped it out entirely. So of course, the number of speakers who learned it from their own forebears is small. Plus it never was written (in words — there were weavings and carvings and other graphical forms of story telling) so there's not much there to fall back on.

@jayeless Another great entry! Linguistics and its evolution, as well as its place on our brain is fascinating.

@Miraz Oh, absolutely. I have to admire how successful Maori speakers have been in reinvigorating their language, given that. Very few Aboriginal languages here are still being passed on to younger generations, and even the most spoken of them only have about 3,000 speakers 😔 But keeping those languages alive is so important for those communities, too.

@Portufraise Thank you! 😊