Cook Islands Maori – A Resource Guide

In honor of the anniversary of Cook Islands Self-Governance!

I remember one fine day in Suva at the University of the South Pacific where I acquired the last copy of a Cook Islands Maori dictionary that the bookstore had. I still have it on my shelf right here, a bright green color that I won’t ever forget.

I was first introduced to Cook Islands Maori, sometimes also referred to as Rarotongan, via the Lonely Planet South Pacific Phrasebook (I have the earlier edition which was also, get this, bright green. Okay, closer to tourqouise, actually).

Along with Niue, the Cook Islands are not only countries in free association with New Zealand but are also self-governing. Not only that, they also have the distinction of being the last territories / countries on earth to experience the new day, given that they are located due east of the International Date Line.

Cook Islands Maori acts as a bit of a bridge between New Zealand Maori and Tahitian (the latter of which it closely resembles).

Resources are quite difficult to find it you actually don’t know where to look, so in honor of the anniversary of Cook Islander Self-Governance, here I am with a handy list.

For one, I-E-Ko-Ko! serves as a very helpful introduction to the language with thorough dialogues in useful situations. You can acquire PDF’s of the book for free here: https://pasifika.tki.org.nz/Pasifika-languages/Cook-Islands-Maori

The entire bright green dictionary that I got on my trip is also available online (and searchably so) at http://cookislandsdictionary.com/. A lot of the sample sentences are also extremely useful and other entries related to other languages of the Cook Islands are also available as well.

The Bible is also available here: https://www.bible.com/bible/1847/GEN.1.CIMB

A new development also occurred on Glosbe (the online dictionary) in which Cook Islands Maori now has a translation memory from the 2019 Jehovah’s Witnesses archives as well (I remember back when I got the book last year I tried to look at the translation memory and there was nothing there).

However one thing to keep in mind is that, as with other languages of the Pacific (such as Tahitian) macrons and glottal stops may not be included in materials for native speakers, thereby making things slightly challenging for learners, in a sense.

But the dictionaries and learner materials are all made for ease of the learner in which the macrons (ā, ē, etc.) and the glottal stops (‘) are included.

Happy learning!

The State of Being Able to Learn the Nauruan Language in 2019

Happy 51^st Birthday Nauru!

Today I’m going to speak about my experience with (trying to) learn Nauruan, which collapsed several times due to no fault of my own.

First off, the Nauruan language does have significant boons that some smaller languages don’t have.

There’s Nauruan Wikipedia you can visit at https://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bwiema_peij

There’s a predictive Nauruan-language keyboard available with SwiftKey (I can’t say how good the predictions are, but it seems to be better than the Greenlandic one).

Music is readily available on YouTube and it seems that even the most translated website in existence (I am speaking about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Organizational Page, translated into 700+ languages) has a good deal of text and even audio. While a lot of material from JW does end up in Glosbe’s translation database, this hasn’t been the case with Nauruan as of the time of writing.

There isn’t a single book for learning the Nauruan language that is user-friendly. There is a German-Language Grammar that I wrote about earlier this month. It’s about as user-friendly as it gets: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293006715589;view=1up;seq=58;size=125

It is from before World War I and it seems that the orthography is quite different from what you can find on the aforementioned Nauruan Wikipedia. (Reminder to those unaware: Nauruan was once a German colony).

The advantages to this book: the grammar is clearly laid out, there are even texts for learning and a helpful dictionary. The one disadvantage is that it is probably not going to prepare you to have your first conversation. Take phrasebooks from Lonely Planet, Berlitz or Reise Know How / Kauderwelsch. Those TRAIN you to learn things that are instantly useful within a matter of minutes. This book isn’t like that.

Then we get to Stephen Trussel’s website. His work with Kiribati / Gilbertese has not only been fantastic but actually made my studies of that enchanting language POSSIBLE (I can’t thank him enough for what he has done). Concerning Nauruan, he did put a dictionary online that I in turn converted into a Memrise course (along with some other sources).

I decided to put it online and you can access it here. It probably won’t make you fluent or make you even conversational but it may be useful: https://www.memrise.com/course/1794555/nauruan/

There are some other grammars and courses that I’ve seen referenced in scholarship, but I cannot acquire copies of any of them. Part of me was hoping to get an accessible Nauruan language learning textbook when I visited the University of the South Pacific. They didn’t have anything in the way of Nauruan language materials when I went in August 2018 (as far as I could see), but they did have Cook Islands Maori / Rarotongan and Tuvaluan stuff (again, that trip made my TUVALUAN studies possible!).

Here’s what I think needs to be done in order to make the Nauruan Language accessible. I think that there are a lot of people who will appreciate being able to learn “the language of the world’s smallest independent republic”.

• I would like to translate that Nauruan Grammar book and hopefully publish it but I don’t know how to go about doing it and / or updating the orthography.
• A “Hacking Nauruan Course” should be made accessible. A native speaker could throw it together in an afternoon. It should have pronouns, “to have”, “to want”, conjunctions, question words, a pronunciation guide and a sentence structure guide. It could be on Memrise, Anki, or even on a free blog. A YouTube tutorial would also be fantastic.
• Some variety of phrasebook, even a free one, should be made available. I think the Lonely Planet Fijian guide was very well put together and I think something in a similar structure would make Nauruan less intimidating. In it should be phrases related to lodging, restaurants and other everyday topics.

 

Perhaps some may think, “well, why bother with a language with so few native speakers?”

Well, I think that in the age of great language death, a lot of people are caring a lot more than they used to. And perhaps it may inspire someone to visit the country or otherwise spread knowledge about this tiny island that others in the world deserve to know about.

Naoero eko dogin! (Nauru Forever!)