Judy Gill: When the Language of Governance Reaches The School Gate

How the -tanga register moved from the bureaucracy into everyday New Zealand life

Alternative headlines: From the Policy Desk to the School Gate; How a new public vocabulary entered everyday New Zealand life; The Words that Arrived Without a Lesson

When institutional language becomes compulsory for everyone

What happens when a vocabulary learned inside universities, ministries and professional development courses becomes the compulsory language of people who never passed through those systems?

What happens when the builder, the farmer and the small trader meet it for the first time not in a policy document, but in their child’s school?

That is where the change in New Zealand has become visible.

For a large part of the professional class, the new moral and organisational vocabulary arrived gradually: through teacher training, public-sector employment, corporate frameworks and ongoing professional learning. It came with explanation, context and institutional reinforcement. It became normal.

For many others, whose working lives are organised around contracts, customers, harvests, workshops and small businesses, it did not arrive at all — until they encountered it in the systems they cannot avoid: early childhood education, schools, councils and health services.

There, the interaction is not optional.

It is about their child.

One side is fluent.

The other is decoding.

The rise of the -tanga register

At the centre of this shift is a particular kind of word: the abstract noun ending in -tanga.

From older roots come modern institutional forms: manaaki → manaakitanga, whanaunga → whanaungatanga, rangatira → rangatiratanga, kaitiaki → kaitiakitanga, wairua → wairuatanga.

These are now presented as the moral and organisational foundations of public life — in education, governance, health and community charters.

They appear on: school gates, strategic plans, embroidered uniform badges, institutional values statements, club constitutions.

They are described as ancient and uniquely indigenous.

But as abstract, systematised governance language, they are recent.

A language that expanded within a generation

William Williams’ 1844 dictionary recorded a language of roughly 5,000 words — rich in concrete description, social relationship and the natural world.

The large-scale abstract noun forms that now dominate institutional discourse do not appear there as headwords.

They emerge, in dictionary form, in the modern expansion of the lexicon — most visibly in late-20th- and early-21st-century compilations such as the comprehensive Māori–English dictionary published in 2005, which reflects a vastly enlarged and systematised vocabulary designed for a modern administrative, educational and legal environment.

The shift is not from silence to speech.

It is from a spoken relational language to a written governance register.

Concepts older than the register

The ethical content carried by these terms is not new.

Care for others.

Collective responsibility.

Legitimate authority.

Stewardship of resources.

Belonging and social cohesion.

These are long-standing principles in Western civic and religious traditions, embedded for centuries in: church administration; parliamentary government; civil service codes; municipal organisation; university statutes; voluntary associations.

What is new is the lexicon in which they are now expressed and the claim that this lexicon represents an ancient and uniquely national moral framework.

The concepts are old.

The register is new.

Where this language was formed

This vocabulary did not develop in playgrounds, on building sites, in shops or in ordinary domestic conversation.

It was shaped in: academia, teacher education, policy development, public-sector administration, and professional training environments.

It is, in origin, a top-down register.

From there it flowed outward — through the education system, through regulatory frameworks, and into the constitutions and charters of community organisations.

Why institutions adopted it

Institutions adopt shared vocabularies for reasons that are not mysterious.

They provide: a common moral language across diverse sectors; a visible framework for legitimacy; a way of expressing national distinctiveness; and a symbolic re-founding after a period of historical critique.

In a country reassessing its past, a new lexicon offers the possibility of continuity without the inherited burden of older terms whose moral authority has been weakened.

It is a re-naming that promises renewal.

The compliance mechanism

In regulated sectors such as early childhood education and schooling, this vocabulary is not simply aspirational.

It is evidential.

Services and schools must demonstrate alignment with national expectations through: charters, policies, internal evaluation, strategic planning, and recorded communication with families.

Those records are reviewed.

The recognised terminology is how alignment becomes visible.

So the language appears — repeatedly — in: Educa entries; SchoolDocs; online newsletters; Board of Trustees minutes; official Facebook pages.

It is the language of compliance.

Where the two language histories meet

This is the point at which the change becomes socially visible.

The parent whose working life has never required this register encounters it in the documentation that governs their child’s education.

For the teacher or administrator it is ordinary professional language.

For the parent it is new, and it appears in a context where clarity matters.

Not in a lecture hall.

At the school gate.

This is not a clash of cultures.

It is a meeting of different language histories.

An opt-in language becomes compulsory

Adult and Community Education offers voluntary pathways into te reo for those who seek them.

But the language of institutional documentation is not opt-in.

It is encountered through: enrolment, permissions, health and safety requirements, and school expectations.

It becomes part of civic life for people who were never introduced to it through formal learning.

That is where the democratic tension arises.

A personal point of departure

This is not, for me, an argument against the Māori language.

I entered this space with enthusiasm.

I have always found the language phonetic, rhythmic and beautiful.

Words such as kaitiakitanga sit easily on the tongue.

What has changed is not the sound of the language, but the historical and institutional framing around it — the presentation of a modern governance register as a timeless moral inheritance, and the expectation that it be received as something uniquely and unquestionably our own.

Not a survival, but a construction

What we are witnessing is not the simple survival of an ancient system.

It is the construction of a modern national vocabulary from older linguistic elements, designed to carry the ethical and administrative needs of a contemporary state.

That is a creative and significant achievement.

But it is not what it is usually said to be.

A question for a democratic society

Every society develops a shared civic language.

The question is not whether this one should exist.

It is how it is introduced.

Whether it is taught as language.

Whether it is translated for those who meet it in essential services.

Whether its history is described accurately.

Whether citizens encounter it as participants — or as outsiders required to decode it.

Because when a vocabulary becomes the medium through which people relate to the institutions that govern their lives and educate their children, it ceases to be merely symbolic.

It becomes part of democratic access.

And that is a matter not of ideology, but of inclusion.

Judy Gill BSc, DipTchg, is a parent, former teacher, and a staunch advocate for secular education.