Professor Stephen May is an international authority on language rights, language policy, bilingual education, and the multilingual turn in language teaching. He will give a talk about linguistic racism by white New Zealanders toward the Indigenous Māori language.
About the lecture
Linguistic racism, a form of cultural racism, uses discursive constructions of language use and related linguistic hierarchies as a proxy for the racialized discrimination and subordination of Indigenous peoples and other minoritized ethnic groups.
Here, I explore discourses of linguistic racism by Pākehā (White) New Zealanders in Aotearoa New Zealand toward te reo Māori, the Indigenous Māori language, in everyday discourses and the media. I focus particularly on the public contestation of the increasing normalization of te reo Māori in contemporary New Zealand society, the result of the successes of the last 40 years of Māori language revitalization, via both overt and covert forms of linguistic racism toward te reo Māori.
These discourses act in defence of English monolingualism, the direct linguistic legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history, along with the privileges this history has provided for White, monolingual English-speaking New Zealanders. Such discourses suggest that, while much has been accomplished concerning Māori language revitalization in Aotearoa New Zealand, these gains remain fragile and open to ongoing contestation and push back.
About Stephen May
Dr. Stephen May (auckland.ac.nz) is Professor in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
His key books include Language and minority rights (2nd ed., 2012), The multilingual turn (2014) and, most recently, Critical ethnography, language, race/ism and education (2023).
Stephen is Series Editor of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed., 2017), and editor of Ethnicities. He is an AERA Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ).
Contact