{"id":22729,"date":"2020-09-15T09:37:03","date_gmt":"2020-09-15T00:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2020\/sep\/15\/i-have-lost-much-of-my-childhood-fluency-in-te-reo-maori-we-must-fight-for-its-survival"},"modified":"2020-09-15T09:37:03","modified_gmt":"2020-09-15T00:37:03","slug":"i-have-lost-much-of-my-childhood-fluency-in-te-reo-maori-we-must-fight-for-its-survival-leigh-marama-mclachlan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=22729","title":{"rendered":"I have lost much of my childhood fluency in te reo M\u0101ori \u2013 we must fight for its survival | Leigh-Marama McLachlan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New Zealand\u2019s national language week will have little or no impact on most Kiwis, but we must protect te reo as a national treasure<\/p>\n<p>I can already feel my heart begin to race when I know I am expected to speak te reo M\u0101ori, the Indigenous tongue of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Where I am from, people know me as this confident, fluent speaker of the M\u0101ori language. But here I am today, sweaty-palmed at the mere thought of saying a simple greeting and introduction in my mother tongue.<\/p>\n<p>It is a far cry from the old me, who would win back-to-back M\u0101ori language speech competitions at a school where we learned everything in total immersion te reo M\u0101ori.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2020\/sep\/15\/i-have-lost-much-of-my-childhood-fluency-in-te-reo-maori-we-must-fight-for-its-survival\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Zealand\u2019s national language week will have little or no impact on most Kiwis, but we must protect te reo as a national treasureI can already feel my heart begin to race when I know I am expected to speak te reo M\u0101ori, the Indigenous tongue of Aotea&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1552,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,897,56,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-maori","category-new-zealand","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1552"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22730,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22729\/revisions\/22730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}