Research Seminar | Professor Nicola Daly (University of Waikato)

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Can something as small as a picturebook contribute to something as big as language revitalisation? In this presentation I present some research from Aotearoa New Zealand which suggests they can.

Aotearoa New Zealand is a multilingual society but there are only two official languages. Despite the dominance of English as a language in everyday use (over 90% of New Zealanders use English), neither of the official languages are English. Te Reo Māori was given legal status in 2007 and in 2016 New Zealand Sign Language was also supported in legislation.

Te Reo Māori is the Indigenous language of New Zealand, and after a period of extreme endangerment, since the early 1980s there has been a concerted governmental effort to revitalise Te Reo Māori which has been reflected to in the languages used in picturebooks. Dual language picturebooks involve two written languages in the telling of a story alongside the visual language of the accompanying illustrations.

In this presentation I share a timeline showing the increasing use of Te Reo Māori alongside English in children’s literature, and then research in which Māori-English picturebooks were explored with parents of children in an English-medium early childhood setting which was increasing the use of Te Reo Māori in its everyday pedagogy. Findings suggest these small books can indeed increase the use of an endangered Indigenous language in the home by both parents and children.