atagotiak:

ofmdtereomaori:

always-a-mad-comet:

I think you guys will appreciate the fact that the Te Reo word for French is Reo Wiwi which basically just translates to ouioui language

Oui! And Wīwī isn’t just the word for the language, it’s also the word for French and France.

This all dates back to the early years of contact between Māori and Europeans, when communication was in te reo on the Māori side (obviously) and basic Tahitian on the European side (which is a whole other interesting story).

Māori realised that there were two distinct groups of white people turning up, and that the easiest way to tell them apart was that people in the smaller group kept saying “oui, oui”. So they became ngā tāngata Wīwī - the oui oui people.

It’s the same with Inuktitut!

We call French uivititu, which means ‘Oui language’