Maori Language Services

Māori or te reo Māori commonly te reo (“the language”), is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori, where it has the status of an official language. Linguists classify it within the Eastern Polynesian languages as being closely related to Cook Islands Māori, Tuamotuan and Tahitian; somewhat less closely to Hawaiian and Marquesan; and more distantly to the languages of Western Polynesia, including Samoan, Tokelauan, Niuean and Tongan. According to the Maori Language Commission the number of fluent adult speakers fell to about 10,000 in 1995. History > According to legend, Māori came to New Zealand from the mythical Hawaiki. Current anthropological thinking places their origin in tropical eastern Polynesia, mostly likely from the Southern Cook or Society Islands region, and that they arrived by deliberate voyages in seagoing canoes – possibly double-hulled and probably sail-rigged. These settlers probably arrived by about AD 1280 (see Māori origins). Their language and its dialects developed in isolation until the 19th century. Since about 1800, the Māori language has had a tumultuous history. It started this period as the predominant language of New Zealand. In the 1860s, it became a minority language in the shadow of the English spoken by many settlers, missionaries, gold seekers, and traders. In the late 19th century, the colonial governments of New Zealand and its provinces introduced an English-style school system for all New Zealanders. From the 1880s, on the insistence of Maori MPs, the government forbade the use of the Māori language in schools. Increasing numbers of Māori people learned English. Written Maori > The first printed Māori book was Thomas Kendall’s 1815 reader called E korao no New Zealand (Talk from New Zealand). The first Māori language newspaper was published in 1842. By 1900 more than a thousand publications in Māori had appeared. In 1867 the Native Schools Act decreed that English should be the only language used in the education of Māori children, which lead to many Māori children being punished for speaking their own language. From the 1940s onwards, the Māori began migrating to urban areas where they were living amongst the English-speaking Pākehā. As a result, many of them chose to speak English and to raise their children as English speakers. In the 1970s, Māori urban groups began to be concerned about the decline of the Māori language and set up various schemes and organisations to promote the language, including bilingual and Māori medium schools, radio stations and a TV channel.