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By the 1970s few Māori children were growing up speaking Māori. The response, from 1982, was the kōhanga reo or 'language nest': preschools where elders looked after the youngest children and spoke nothing but Māori to them all day.

New Zealand, 1982

LanguageHistory

The story behind the card

Kōhanga reo means 'language nest' in Māori. The first opened at Pukeatua in Wainuiomata, near Wellington, in 1982; by 1994 more than 800 were caring for about 14,500 children. The idea was that a language survives not as a school subject but as the ordinary language of daily life, at the age when children pick it up without effort. Fluent speakers were mostly elderly and few, and placing them with toddlers put them where they mattered most. The model inspired Hawaii's Pūnana Leo preschools from 1984, and later language nests for Sámi in Finland and for several Indigenous languages in Canada.

Türkçe oku
1970'lere gelindiğinde Maori çocuklarından çok azı Maorice konuşarak büyüyordu. Çare 1982'de bulundu: kōhanga reo, yani “dil yuvası”. Bu anaokullarında yaşlılar en küçük çocuklara bakıyor ve onlarla bütün gün yalnızca Maorice konuşuyordu.
Yeni Zelanda, 1982

Kōhanga reo, Maoricede “dil yuvası” demektir. İlk yuva 1982'de Wellington yakınlarındaki Wainuiomata'da, Pukeatua'da açıldı; 1994'e gelindiğinde 800'den fazla yuvada yaklaşık 14.500 çocuk vardı. Arkasındaki düşünce şuydu: Bir dil okulda ders olarak okutulunca değil, çocukların onu zahmetsizce kaptığı yaşta gündelik hayatın dili olunca yaşar. Maoriceyi akıcı konuşanlar azdı ve çoğu yaşlıydı; onları küçük çocuklarla bir araya getirmek, en çok işe yarayacakları yere koymak demekti. Model, 1984'ten itibaren Hawaii'deki Pūnana Leo anaokullarına, ardından Finlandiya'da Sami dili ve Kanada'da birçok yerli dil için açılan dil yuvalarına örnek oldu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Kōhanga reo
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