Māori
Language · official in 1 country
Te reo Māori, often shortened to te reo, had no script before Europeans arrived; Northern Māori and English Protestant clergy fixed its Latin spelling in the 19th century. It is the Eastern Polynesian language of New Zealand's indigenous people, related to Cook Islands Māori and Tahitian. The Māori Language Act 1987 made it an official language, and in 2018 about 190,000 people could hold an everyday conversation in it.
The language on record
- Own name
- Māori
- ISO 639-1
- MI
- ISO 639-3
- MRI
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Eastern Polynesian
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Māori is official
New Zealand is the record, where Māori is one of three official languages together with English and New Zealand Sign Language.
Official beside Māori
About Māori
How schools pushed Māori out
The Education Ordinance Act 1847 made English the main language of schools, and the Native Schools Code of 1880 tightened the restrictions. By the early 20th century Māori was banned in school playgrounds and classrooms. Proposals in 1930 to put Māori on the curriculum were blocked. Most Māori still spoke it as a first language until the Second World War, but migration to the cities after 1945 cut the number of speakers sharply, and by the 1980s fewer than 20% of Māori spoke it well enough to count as native speakers.
What brought te reo back
Kōhanga Reo, from 1982, immersed infants in Māori until school age, and the first Kura Kaupapa Māori school followed in 1985. A 1994 ruling of the Privy Council held the state responsible for the language under the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. State-funded Māori Television began in March 2004, and its channel Te Reo, broadcasting only in Māori, launched on 28 March 2008.
From about 2015 the language gained ground even among New Zealanders without Māori roots. Rotorua declared itself bilingual in August 2017. A strategy launched in 2019 aims at 1 million speakers by 2040. After complaints rose fivefold, the Broadcasting Standards Authority said in March 2021 that it would no longer entertain complaints about Māori in broadcasts. In 2023 about 7% of school students were taught fully or partly in Māori.
Why some Māori words are written with double vowels
The modern alphabet has 15 letters, among them the digraphs ng and wh, and each of the five vowels has a long form. Early explorers wrote what they heard: gumera for kumara, Weygate for Waikato. Samuel Lee of Cambridge worked with Ngāpuhi chiefs on an orthography published in 1820, which did not mark vowel length at all.
Writers marked length unevenly for a century. The University of Auckland used doubled vowels, as in waahine, until 2000. The Māori Language Commission, created by the 1987 act, favoured macrons, and they are now standard in the news media. Doubled vowels survive in the Waikato, where the Waikato-Tainui iwi prefers them, and in Inland Revenue's name Te Tari Taake, spelled to avoid tāke looking like the English word take.
Common questions
Questions about Māori
When did Māori become an official language of New Zealand?
With the Māori Language Act 1987. New Zealand now has three official languages: te reo Māori, English and New Zealand Sign Language.
What does te reo mean?
"The language". It is short for te reo Māori, "the Māori language", and is the usual name in New Zealand.
Why is Māori spelled with a macron?
The macron marks a long vowel, and vowel length changes meaning in Māori. The Māori Language Commission made it the preferred mark, the government's official place-name list first carried macrons in 2008, and most New Zealand news media have used them since 2017 or 2018. The English spelling Maori, without the macron, still appears in general media.