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Death narratives are common in literature on the Mäori language. While there is a place for language death, such a strong focus on death may be limiting our scholarship. Conclusions drawn from such approaches may risk overlooking key information about language health, and this could pull the scholarship further away from reliable language health conclusions. This article discusses the need to offer space to new language conversations in contemporary times. The most recent published scholarship in the Mäori language discipline is examined to support a new discussion. Using the taxonomy of ethnolinguistic vitality (Giles, Bourhis, & Taylor, 1977) to collate recent research, it is posited that the death narrative might no longer be relevant in and of itself, and that a reorientation of the discourse may be needed. By removing the deficit and death lens from the conversation, alternative, and arguably more helpful, analyses of the state of the language might be obtained. This allows for a deeper understanding of our language revitalisation efforts.

This article describes the process of understanding how translanguaging is naturally used in multilingual teaching environments and then applying this analysis to the creation of translanguaging grammar rules and ultimately pedagogical materials. Focusing primarily on our work with a Māori puna reo in Aotearoa New Zealand, but also drawing upon our work with a Samoan a’oga amata, we explain in this article how we created translingual children’s books and other teaching materials that are able to embody translingual practices and core cultural values. After discussing the materials and their development, this article ends with an initial analysis of the materials’ effectiveness as well as a discussion of the importance of translingual pedagogical materials that goes beyond traditional discussions of codeswitching in the classroom.

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