Attitudes are the biggest impediment to language revitalisation,” says Larry Parr, kaihautū (chief executive) at Te Māngai Pāho, the state agency charged with promoting Māori language and culture through broadcasting. “The environment needs to be receptive to the notion first. You can’t have infertile ground to plant your seeds.”
So Parr is thrilled that for the first time in several years, research tracking New Zealanders’ attitudes towards te reo Māori has seen a small but significant positive shift. That translates to a greater proportion of the population showing active support for this country’s first language.
The research, released last month and covering 2024, is based on a theoretical model that segments the population into seven groups ranging from zero interest in te reo to full support. Parr says a 3% positive movement of the midpoint is “really exciting”.
However, there’s a poisonous patch in the garden. Parr describes as “disappointing” various moves by the right-leaning coalition government of National, New Zealand First and Act to discourage state use of te reo Māori even though it has been an official language since 1987.
NZ First went into the 2023 election campaigning to strip state agencies of their Māori names, with leader Winston Peters saying it was “not an attack on the Māori language – it’s an attack on the elite virtue-signallers who have hijacked language for their own socialist means”.
The position was written into the National-NZF coalition agreement with an addendum: state entities were to communicate primarily in English except those specifically related to Māori.
Numerous decisions since have been seen by many as reo-bashing within a wider agenda of anti-Māori, anti-Tiriti o Waitangi prejudice. A year ago, Education Minister Erica Stanford culled Te Ahu o te Reo, a popular reo learning programme for teachers. The May 2025 Budget confirmed cuts to resource teachers of Māori, a decision that teachers’ union NZEI Te Riu Roa has taken to judicial review.
Passport pandering
In July, Internal Affairs Minister and Act deputy leader Brooke van Velden said the Māori title on the cover of the Kiwi passport, Uruwhenua Aotearoa, would cease to have precedence over the English New Zealand Passport title, a format in place since 2021. In August, the Education Ministry announced a decision to discontinue a junior English language reading primer that contained six simple Māori words, triggering intense debate. The words are all in dictionaries of New Zealand English. A bilingual road-signage programme has stalled, and attempts by the New Zealand Geographic Board to correct the spelling of mangled Māori placenames were blocked by Minister for Land Information Chris Penk.
Te Wānanga o Aotearoa has had as many as 18,000 people on the waiting list for its te reo programmes.
Associate Professor Awanui Te Huia, a Māori languge researcher and lecturer at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, says the government’s attitude risks damaging the environment that supports te reo Māori, as well as intercultural relations.
“A critical finding from our research emphasises that attitudes towards te reo Māori cannot be separated from attitudes towards Māori people,” she says. “You can’t have positive attitudes towards Māori language without having positive attitudes towards Māori people.”
Victoria’s vice-chancellor Maori, Professor Rawinia Higgins, is also toihau (chair) of Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori – the Māori Language Commission, which co-ordinates the crown’s plans for the revitalisation of te reo Māori. Higgins sees “no rhyme or reason to the way this government is treating te reo”.
She points out the government is out of step with the official strategy for te reo, called Maihi Karauna, which has a goal of 1 million New Zealanders speaking basic te reo Māori by 2040, with te reo increasingly heard, seen and valued in daily life.
Higgins says somewhat wearily that she thinks of the current situation as “a glitch in the matrix. I say that not just to be flip … despite the glitch, there are still a lot of people who are very pro te reo Māori.” In the course of her work she has even noted “a little bit of defiance … it’s the Kiwi attitude of ‘I don’t really want to be told what I can’t do.’”
Parr agrees. He believes part of the reason for last year’s improved KoPA result is pushback from those who don’t approve of political moves that appear to reduce the status of te reo Māori.
“I really genuinely like to think that is a part of it,” he says, adding, however, that the data requires more analysis to ascertain this. “The majority of people in Aotearoa appreciate what’s happened with te reo Māori over the past 50 years and think we’re travelling in the right direction and are responding accordingly.”
Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka is responsible for the crown’s reo strategy. A fluent reo speaker himself, he appears to be stuck in an uncomfortable position between colleagues who want to downplay te reo and those looking to him to defend it.
The Listener asked Potaka to address criticism that his advocacy for te reo within the coalition government has been ineffective. In an emailed response, he didn’t directly answer the question, saying, “te reo Māori is part of our country’s DNA – past, present and future … the government continues to use English and te reo Māori branding across most government departments and agencies”.
Potaka listed areas where the government is making a “substantial investment” in te reo – among them teacher capability, curriculum development and infrastructure in Māori-medium (immersion) education, and the Te Matatini kapa haka festival.
“It’s important that everyone takes responsibility for what part they can play in revitalising te reo Māori,” Potaka says. “Government creates the conditions within which outcomes can be achieved, but the revitalisation of te reo Māori requires as many New Zealanders as possible to contribute.”
Stats say it all
Official data shows increasing numbers are doing so. According to Stats NZ’s General Social Survey, more than half of the population agree or strongly agree that the government should encourage and support the use of te reo Māori in everyday situations. Three in five New Zealanders think te reo Māori should be a core subject in primary schools.
People’s grasp of te reo is also improving. The survey found the proportion of the population who said they were “able to speak more than a few words or phrases” in te reo rose from 24% in 2018 to 30% in 2021. The proportion able to speak te reo “fairly well” also increased, from 6.1% in 2018 to 7.9% in 2021. Looking at the Māori population only, 34% are able to speak te reo Māori fairly well, and almost a quarter speak te reo as a first language.
Demand for reo classes remains strong. At tertiary level, there was a 93% increase in students enrolled in tertiary-level reo courses in the decade to 2024. One of the largest providers, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, reports it once had a waiting list of 18,000 people – that’s not a misprint – for its popular reo programmes; the waiting list numbers 300 at present. Te Wānanga delivers courses, the majority free, to all-comers at 80 sites around the country; last year, the ethnic mix of its reo students was 66% Māori and 26% European, with Pacific, Asian and other ethnicities making up the balance.
At Auckland University of Technology, Sandy Hata, programme co-lead for te reo Māori, says the institution scales to meet demand. Entry to its free lower-level classes is first come, first served; students wanting to study te reo from March 2026 need to enrol next month.
Some demand is being met by corporates. During Matariki 2022, ANZ Bank launched three levels of voluntary online classes that can be taken in work time. So far, says Karleen Everitt, the bank’s te kaitohu rautaki Māori (head of te ao Māori strategy), almost1500 of 7500 staff have taken part in one or more of the bank’s language courses.
The Bank of New Zealand, which has more than 5000 staff, launched voluntary in-person classes with teacher Hēmi Kelly in February last year. Waipora Marshall-Lobb, BNZ’s Māori capability lead, says the classes are 90 minutes once a week and take place in work time. So far, 300 people have completed the nine-week programme, with 60 under way. Marshall-Lobb says a key focus is learning pronunciation and basic phrases.
“That’s really important in terms of customer names, colleague names, place names,” she says. “Greetings and farewells are also something we focus on – how to introduce yourself in te reo … it’s all about building those relationships and connecting with people and understanding where they come from.”
Colonisation, assimilation policies and the onslaught of English brought te reo Māori to the brink of extinction by the 1970s. The efforts of several generations of New Zealanders have brought it back.
Victoria University’s Higgins – despite her frustrations with some of the messages emanating from the Beehive – remains optimistic. “The momentum for language revitalisation is strong because we have established generations of native language speakers again – and that’s hard to unpick, you know.”
September 14-20 marks the 50th Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week). For more information, visit reomaori.co.nz. For more about the KoPA personas, visit tmp.govt.nz/en/documents/169/KoPA-personas-info-final.pdf