Māori: Approaching a (Dia)Critical Mass
by BJ Janiec

It’s a catastrophe in the making. The Māori people are disappearing at an alarming rate and now teeter on the edge of extinction. And it’s not because of war or disease, nor random acts of God. Nor is it due to acculturation, a reason less ominous and more understandable, though no less acceptable.
No, the answer is much more pedestrian.
It can be traced to a source found halfway across the world from their New Zealand homeland. The Māori people are disappearing because Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the creator of the world’s most widely used computer operating system, refuses to act in either an enlightened or responsible manner, in regards to a much-needed upgrade to its physical QWERTY PC keyboard.
Now, here’s the backstory to this travesty:
To encode and decode their language, the Māoris rely on the macron, a diacritical mark “ ¯ “ which, according to Merrimack-Webster Online Dictionary “is placed over a vowel to indicate that the vowel is long or placed over a syllable or used alone to indicate a stressed or long syllable in a metrical foot.” For most of us, the macron holds little value. But for the Māoris, it is essential to the survival of their language.
For example: In Te Reo Māori, the language used by the Māori people, a macron indicates vowel length. Some words spelled the same have different meanings, depending on the presence (or not) of a macron: E.g., āna means “here is” or “behold.” Āna te tangata! (“Behold, the man!’). Ana, with no macron, means “a cave.” Here’s a few more interesting Māori words (with italicized comments following each entry):
• Whaikōrero: the art and practice of speechmaking. The irony here is how can one even make a speech if one doesn’t have the language to do so?
• Ngāi Tātou: a term for everyone present — ”we all.” Without the macron, NO ONE’S HERE!
• Ō: of; many names begin with Ō, meaning “the place of so-and-so,” e.g., Ōkahukura, Ōkiwi, Ōhau. And but that’s okay because without a macron NO place exists for anyone to NOT be here.
Historically, for the Māori people (and for just about everyone else), the process of adding a macron to text has been nigh impossible. (When’s the last time you fiddled with Microsoft’s character map on your keyboard?) But a glimmer of hope appeared with the advent of mobile phones and tablets, viz. simple keystroke gestures on virtual keyboards that allowed for easy access to diacritical marks. Unfortunately, these advancements did little to alleviate the problem, and in fact, they only highlighted it.
A simple examination of OS usage shows why:
While Android and iOS operating systems comprise 89% of the market share on mobile devices, over 91% of the 278 million desktops and laptops still employ old Windows-based QWERTY hardware keyboards and their backward, clumsy mechanisms for invoking Unicode in order to add a diacritical mark. This is especially pertinent for the younger generation of Māoris, those charged with keeping the culture alive, where speed and easy access are critical to a technology’s continued usage. (It’s almost a given that impatience is a hallmark of Millennials of all ethnicities; if an application isn’t fast, it isn’t used.) If the macron is difficult to access and employ, as it now is on a physical keyboard, the practice of using it will be discarded. And without the macron, the language will fail and the culture will flounder.
And without a culture, the Māoris will perish.
But all of this begs the question: Why? Why is it so important to save the Māori people? Why is it so important for Microsoft to save an ethnic group that comprises only (≅) .00008% of the world’s population?
Well, for one thing, the Māoris are rich contributors to our collective artistic heritage. How bereft would the world be without tattoos (the Polynesian word tatau means “to wring moisture from,” as in ink from the skin. [Samoans claim the word came from the Fijians; the Fijians claim it came from the the Samoans; and the Māoris claim it came from the underworld!]) And while skin art may not have originated with them, it was indeed popularized and exported (via Capt. James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks and others) beginning in 1769 to the West. The Māoris have also contributed to the world of sports. Where would the rugby universe be without these ferocious Māori warrior/players? And who can ever forget a pre-match haka once observed?
But more to the point, by adding an easily accessible macron to their hardware keyboard, Microsoft would be one of the few corporations to embed a purely Kantian directive in its mission statement, one not so obviously PC (politically correctively) motivated — though to be sure Microsoft would reap a huge PR market boost were it to present (and subtly promote) this implementation as an ethical imperative. Plus, in addition to saving the Māoris, there would be the collateral benefit of cultural reparations as well — Microsoft’s (small) way of making up for the sins of their (white) forefathers who were all but responsible for decimating the culture in the first place.
So why isn’t Microsoft taking care of business?
A close examination shows the answer may be threefold:
First, Microsoft simply isn’t aware of the impact this gap in technology is having on the Māoris. Due diligence in assessing customer needs has never been a strong point for the company, as evidenced by the introduction of Vista and Windows 8 and 8.1, to cite a few examples. “Build it and they will come” has always been the corporate mantra, and only after the fact that their new technology is performing far less capably than desired (and after fielding customer complaints, for sure) are multiple patches and upgrades released that should have been incorporated in the product in the first place. Such is the case for their keyboards. While third party vendors have, without financial incentive, introduced both Latin and non-Latin keyboards amenable to languages as diverse as Faroese (45,000 speakers) and Inuktitut (35,000 speakers) — comprising ≅ 000006% and 000005% of the world population, respectively — the best Microsoft could do for the Māoris was to provide a link (found after an exhaustive web search) to something called the New Zealand Māori keyboard definition that was published in 2006 (no upgrades since then) and requires a download and allows for an easier but still cumbersome method for inputting macrons (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21115) — which only proves that Microsoft must have been aware of the issue.
A plausible explanation, one which would give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, is that they were (and are) aware of it, but that present proprietary patents for easily accessible diacritical marks on hardware keyboards are owned by other companies and are so comprehensive and tightly secured that Microsoft is precluded from developing the technology — unless, of course, the cost was justifiable.
Which leads us to the third reason (and probably — knowing how corporations operate in 21st century America — the most likely). Microsoft, in their corporate mindset, just can’t justify the expense. Bottom line, the Māori people just aren’t worth it.
But if Microsoft thinks this issue isn’t important (despite the reasons argued above), and it is a tactical, corporate decision (for the logic reasoned above), then the question has got to be asked: what’s next? Why wouldn’t they just eliminate diacritical marks altogether and be done with it? After all, who would be the worse for it?
Probably the French, for one. The Spanish. Any Cyrillic speaking cultures. Any culture that uses diacritical marks to make its language communicable, alive and vital (e.g., a pīnyīn standard to express Mandarin tonalities in the Latin alphabet.) And last but not least — big gasp! here — linguists.
Welcome to the vast power Microsoft has over the shape of the language landscape, power that if not wielded or considered carefully could lead to a subtle (or nefarious — who makes the decision?) manipulation of all that can and cannot be communicated, and what this all leads to, if drawn to its logical end, is either a direct or indirect quarantine of freedom of speech. (And not to dismiss this argument for the sake of fallacious reasoning, it’s smart to remember that a slippery slope argument is sometimes still a slippery slope!)
So in summation, Microsoft really needs to address this issue. And after addressing it, they need to correct it for the benefit of the Māoris and all of mankind. And if they don’t, if they continue on their present course, our bottom line is we’re all in a deep pile of . . .
Tūtae: excrement, ordure!
