Tokelauan is on UNESCO'S list of the world's severely endangered languages. There are more Tokelauans living in New Zealand than in the Pacific atoll group.
Tokelau has a population of around 1600 and with its highest point being only 5 metres above sea level, it is particularly vulnerable to sea level rises.
Atafu, Tokelau Photo: RNZ PACIFIC / MACKENZIE SMITH
Middleton tells Nine To Noon he came to be fascinated by the language partly because of its “wild” sentence structure.
“It excites me, I know that sounds a bit lame, but it’s got some really interesting things going on in the language which, as a linguist, it becomes something we want to look at and figure out what’s going on in people’s brains.”
He came to look at Tokelauan language while studying at linguistics at Auckland University where he discovered that academics there had been studying the language in the 1990s but it hadn’t been picked up since.
“I realised this is a resource and it’s a language that just hasn’t been looked at for the last 20 or 30 years. I basically looked at it from a purely linguistic point of view but have now become much more interested in the status of it and the socio-political side of it.”
Middleton explains that in English we have the ability to put emphasis on certain words to change the meaning of a sentence. For instance, ‘John didn’t eat the pies’ is a straightforward statement, but if we emphasise John we’d be suggesting someone else did eat the pies.
Tokelauan, he says, also has this ability, but it also allows speakers to change the place of certain words in a sentence to have the same effect.
“In our eyes, it’s suddenly changing the whole word order and it completely confused me, especially right at the start, but after a bit it became clear that it was genuinely to do with putting emphasis on something.”
For instance, to emphasis John in the sentence, they’d say ‘didn’t eat John the pies’.
“It focusses using a movement to the word which in linguistics is a really wild concept.”
Middleton says Tokelauan is still a thriving language and is in day-to-day use in the atoll.
“It’s on the endangered list because it has so few speakers… the issue is that we’ve got this climate change situation in the atolls. Because they’re such low-lying islands and the regularity of things like cyclones, there is a real fear that climate change could affect the status of these lands.”
He says the key is to make sure the Tokelauan diaspora keep using the language as they move away from the atoll. There are now, for instance, more Tokelauan speakers in New Zealand than there are in the atoll.
“It has become of major importance to New Zealand and to the Tokelauan language that we maintain and preserve this incredible language in New Zealand.”
