Wellington, New Zealand – a te reo Māori sign which translates to ‘I am Taraika’. [The Guardian, 12 Sep 2022]
Meeting house, Waitangi Treaty Grounds
Name used by its speakers (Endonym): Māori, te reo Māori (“the Māori language”), te reo (“the language”)
Native speakers (estimated): Not precisely known, but the majority of total speakers are likely bilingual native speakers—possibly as many as 200,000.
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 230,000. The 2023 New Zealand census counts 213,800 speakers; Australia reports another 12,000.
Where it’s spoken: Māori is one of the two legally recognized languages of New Zealand, along with New Zealand Sign Language; it’s the second most widely spoken language in the country (after English, the de facto national language). Te reo Māori gained official status with the Māori Language Act of 1987. Though one in five New Zealanders are of Māori descent, only 4.3% of the population report having conversational knowledge of te reo, and the vast majority of speakers are bilingual–to various extents–alongside fluency in English. The highest regional proportion of te reo speakers (17%) is found in the Gisborne region, in the North Island, where over half the population have Māori roots. As in other formerly colonized lands (see: Irish), rural communities are more likely to hold on to te reo Māori as a part of everyday life.
While the language had become largely supplanted by English by the mid-20th century, accelerated by migration to urban areas and pressures to assimilate to ‘mainstream’ society, renewed efforts to promote te reo Māori started in the 1970s and 80s. The first officially bilingual school opened in 1978, followed by the movement for Māori-immersion preschools (kōhanga reo, “language nests”), and the introduction of te reo in primary and secondary schools as either an instructional or second language. Today, nearly all students in the New Zealand education system receive at least some exposure to te reo Māori. The nation with the second-largest Māori population is Australia, with much smaller communities in the UK, US and Canada.
A kapa haka
Language family: Austronesian family, Polynesian branch.
Related languages: As an Eastern Polynesian language, te reo Māori is most closely related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and Rapa Nui (the indigenous language of Easter Island). The Polynesian languages also include Samoan and Tongan. More distantly related languages within the wide-ranging Austronesian family include Malay, the indigenous languages of Taiwan, and the national languages of Madagascar (Malagasy) and the Philippines (Tagalog).
Other Fun Facts:
–In te reo Māori, the name for France is ‘Wīwī’—derived from the phrase “Oui, oui.” We can only guess why this logic only applied to France; perhaps because ‘Yesyes’, ‘Jājā’, and ‘Sīsī’ would each describe more than one country?
More: