16 Jan, 2019 The Te Reo Pulpit Challenge
The Te Reo Pulpit challenge
The language mix of Singapore – and the resulting unique blend
I lived in Singapore for just shy of 9 years. As a nation it’s an amazing melting pot of cultures. As a result, while English is the primary national language, all students must learn a secondary language – with only three options: Mandarin (Chinese), Tamil (Indian) or Malay.
The result of this multilingualism is of a whole new language called ‘Singlish.’ Singlish is a fun mesh-together of all of the above languages. It has English as the ‘base’ language – but then has words and humorous phrases from those other lauguages thrown in – plus a few Chinese dialects. This home-grown ‘street language’ has come about within popular culture, and it’s fun!
The language mix of New Zealand – and the ‘probably on its way’ blend
I don’t believe all New Zealanders need to learn to speak fluent Te Reo. However, I do believe that an attempt to learn a is an appropriate bicultural respect, and also that a ‘mesh language’ like Singlish is likely to continue to develop within our culture. This will be another part of what it is to be a New Zealander – no different to our accent, which is already distinctive around the world. .
Encouraging Te Reo in the local church
While there is already a sincere interest in local churches nationally to learn Te Reo (so churches can run Te Reo Language courses), the easiest idea I can think of that might help to esteem this value to the masses is to make it into a game. Timed for Waitangi – it could be fun.
The download “Te Reo Challebnge” flyer below explains it (the above picture is a crop of the top of the flyer).
Download it, with instructions, here
We hope this is useful 🙂
Other blogs by Dave Mann on this topic
- Te Tiriti of Waitangi – How to overcome bicultural mistrust
- A vision of our bicultural future
- Biculturalism – more important than most think
- New illustrated Treaty of Waitangi series launched
- 5 self-print booklets for churches called ‘Now and then’ – about outreach and our early bicultural story, to give to church members with the bulletin over a 5 week period here (These booklet also encourager support of the Hope Project – which takes some of these stories to the public square).
- A possible sermon outline titled ‘Three Treaties’ (Gibeonites, Waitangi and Jesus) is here, with power point here
