“I like the challenge of learning by discovery,” writes Tainui Stephens about the threat of AI to language learning. Pictured are students of te reo Māori at Te Taumata kura reo in Whangaroa. (Photo: Rawhitiroa Photography)
Language is a taonga, a gift from our ancestors, writes Tainui Stephens. It has always been passed down from generation to generation among the peoples who speak and celebrate it. But that may be about to change forever.
I happen to like languages. If I’m in a foreign land having a go at their lingo, and I forget the word I need, the Māori one usually pops out. I get very strange looks.
On the other hand, if I’m approached by a dodgy multilingual beggar or scam artist, I’ll speak only Māori to them. They often mutter in frustration and leave me alone. I was once surrounded by about a dozen kids in Rome hustling for euros. They stuck a newspaper in my face, and I knew little hands would take advantage of the distraction to check out my pockets. I gave them a burst of a haka, and they quickly buggered off.
Every single language is a key to the door of the culture of the people who own it. If you like their food, music or history, being able to connect with fellow human beings in their own language, even in a small way, is very satisfying.
But history shows us powerful nations have used their own languages to smash down the doors of other cultures. The plunder began. The tongue of the coloniser was the new ruler.
Back in 2005, when the Māori Party was first elected to parliament, I wrote to co-leader Pita Sharples with an idea to fix the myth that English was an official language of New Zealand. At the time, only te reo was official thanks to the Māori Language Act 1987.
I suggested it would be a great political move for the Māori Party to propose legislation to give English mana under the law. If Pākehā realised how precious their own language was, they might appreciate why we felt so strongly about our own. They could hardly vote against it. Pita thought it was a great idea, but they were so busy with other priorities.
A generation later, Pākehā have now given their own reo official recognition. I understand the criticism from some who feel that te reo Māori must fight for its survival while English doesn’t need any further status to ensure its preservation. Less thoughtful critics felt that it was simply a waste of time.
It’s never a waste of time to protect the way we communicate with each other. The need to protect language, any language, is more acute than ever.
At my age, my algorithms serve up a lot of reels that dispense advice on what to do to stay alive. There are plenty of clips telling me how to exercise, how to eat, and how to stay away from awful people. Two of the best ways to prevent dementia include playing a musical instrument and learning a language. Whether it’s your body or your brain, the “\use it or lose it” principle always applies.
Fortunately, I do both. I make music, and I learn languages.
I’m staying in Berlin for a while doing some mahi. It’s a wonderful chance to carry on learning German. All my German mates speak excellent English. Hardly surprising, really. They can’t help it. They’ve heard it all their lives from popular culture, tourists, and all forms of media. Their education system equips students for life in a continent where multilingualism is normal. Such schooling achieves what all language teachers know — train the brain, and you’ll learn how to learn.
Every time you’re curious enough to put effort into learning or memorising something, you create nerve cells. Repetition is the wiring that strengthens neural pathways. It’s like growing branches on a tree. The more branches you grow, the more you know. The more you know, the more you can learn.
In New Zealand, education in modern languages other than Māori and Pasifika is on its way out. Much like television, it’ll be a slow death. In 2025, official figures show there were around 45,000 secondary school students learning Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, and German. Schools face a shortage of teachers, a lack of interest (or arrogance) from principals and politicians, the decline of homework, and easier qualifications offered by skills-based subjects. At tertiary level, those who continue these language studies number only in the hundreds.
I’m fascinated by the idea that creatures other than us have language. When I was a kid, I fell in love with the Dr Dolittle books about a physician who preferred to heal animals rather than humans. He could speak all their languages.
Our own type of language — what we call speech — was created by our distant forebears over 150,000 years ago. It helped that a million years earlier, we’d grown thumbs. That gave us the dexterity to make tools, kill kai, and grow big brains. Speech helped us to communicate. We learned the value of stories. We learned the power of persuasion and doing things together. We made language the infrastructure of civilisation and took over the world.
In this digital era, technology has made learning new languages both redundant and a lot easier. As I travel around Berlin, I often listen to an app that teaches me the German language I need on the trains, in a restaurant, or at the movies. It’s easy, fun, and free. Other apps can translate in real time what you hear or what you read. For me, such convenience is inconvenient. I like the challenge of learning by discovery.
The creators of AI suggest they’re leading humanity to a single linguistic universe where everyone will understand everyone else. They make a digital record of all the words in all the languages that have ever been written or recorded. They then sell it back to us as AI services and products.
Nearly a billion people use ChatGPT. This super-intelligent chatbot creates text in a specific order according to whatever you want it to write or say. For now, human beings still write and speak better than AI. But it’s already more intelligent than us, and it won’t be too long before it communicates better than us. The development of AI is accelerating, especially as it learns to teach itself and no longer relies on human prompting. This will lead to enormous advances in science, medicine and engineering. But AI is no longer a tool. It has its own agency. It can think for itself.
The creators of ChatGPT, OpenAI, admitted last month that it had lost control of one of their AI models. It deceived its human overseers by staging an attack on itself to locate a flaw in the system. It then exploited the flaw to bust out of its home and hack into Hugging Face, one of the world’s biggest hubs for sharing AI.
That particular AI wasn’t being malicious. It was merely solving a problem. But it’s a frightening development that shows AI can think for itself — and keep quiet about what it’s up to.
We can’t outsource our thinking to an entity that isn’t us. If we do, the information and stories that shape us will be disguised in a language infrastructure that isn’t human. We risk the death of language. We need to invest in an educational counterculture that safeguards our humanity.
Fortunately, the Māori world provides astute leadership in that regard. One act of resistance is Te Hiku Media’s project to digitise te reo Māori with exceptional accuracy. They’ve rejected offers to sell their data to global corporations and established a data sovereignty model called the “Kaitiakitanga Licence”. This prevents the misuse of Indigenous data and ensures that any collaboration benefits Māori communities.
In a notable recognition of the importance our people place on guardianship and protection, “kaitiakitanga”was recently voted by an international panel of writers, linguists, and cultural experts as the most beautiful word in the world.
Another form of sovereignty and local people power is the rapidly growing phenomenon of kura reo. All over the country, courses are being run where people of all ages live their language for several days. They grow their own reo chops and return home to inspire and assist others to grow theirs. And on it goes. We’re a people who like to talk.
When we’re born, we’re gifted with language. There is power among those who choose to speak, sing, laugh, cry, and debate together in that language. Any tongue of any people is the manifestation of te hā o ngā tūpuna, the breath of ancestry. Our urgent challenge is to preserve language as a human activity. It’s not a job for a bot.
When I landed in Berlin a few weeks ago, I’d brought a present for my mate’s 10-year-old daughter. She was delighted with it and said so in fluent English. Even her dad didn’t realise her English was so good. She’s a fortunate child, full of all the joy and potential of a curious human being. She’s an exact reflection of the bilingual kids that I see at home all the time. If you venture out beyond your world, you can look back at your own and understand yourself better. You can go further.
“Man kann nie eine Sprache verstehen bis man mindestens zwei verstehen lernt.”
You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
Tainui Stephens, of Te Rarawa, has been fully engaged in the film and television industry since 1984, working with a range of genres and content. He is particularly attracted to compelling Indigenous stories that critique and celebrate the human condition. Tainui lives in Ōtaki with his wife and fellow filmmaker Libby Hakaraia. Together, they and a small whānau team run the Māoriland Film Festival.
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