New Zealand has spent decades trying to protect and revitalise te reo Māori - but how does it compare to the rest of the world?
Te reo Māori was once the only language in Aotearoa before it was overtaken by English and almost became extinct in the early 1900s. Up until the late 1960s, Māori was officially discouraged and children faced corporal punishment for speaking their native tongue.
This year marks 50 years since a petition was presented to Parliament to have Māori language and culture taught in schools. After that, Māori language day was announced, and then three years later, it was extended to a week. The petition was also the catalyst for te reo to become an official language in Aotearoa on August 1, 1987.
As Kiwis celebrate Māori language week, one language studies expert believes New Zealand is doing well at protecting and revitalising its indigenous language compared to other nations.
"Comparatively, we're doing really well, perhaps the best of any indigenous language in the world," said Stephen May, a professor at the University of Auckland and an international authority on language rights and language policy.
Since 2018, the proportion of people able to speak more than a few words or phrases of te reo Māori rose from 24 percent to 30 percent, according to Stats New Zealand's latest figures released in July.
When you compare this to the United States, the Census Bureau counted about 372,000 people speaking a type of Native North American language at home.
The most common of these languages is Navajo, also known as Diné, with nearly 170,000 speakers, followed by Yupik and Dakota, each with about 19,000 speakers.
Slightly north, Statistics Canada said 189,000 people reported their first language to be indigenous, with most of those saying they speak an indigenous language regularly, in a report released in 2022.
May said what makes te reo Māori "so unique and why it's so strong internationally" is because it's one of the very few nationally recognised indigenous languages.
He told Newshub there is significant demand from Kiwis to learn te reo Māori, especially in adults.
"What we're seeing in terms of trends is that adult language courses and adult te reo Māori language courses are completely oversubscribed, there is a huge interest in community-based tertiary adult language learning courses," he said.
May said one of the big reasons te reo is starting to become more normalised in New Zealand, especially over the last 10 years, is because of its everyday use in society.
"We all make use of te reo Māori as a more normal feature of everyday life in New Zealand. So you do hear a lot more of te reo Māori spoken, not just now in schools but in supermarkets or on the streets and in a work context, where it's increasingly apparent, particularly for those that are involved in education or social services," he told Newshub.
"So this sort of means that te reo Māori is increasingly used more and more in language domains, including public ones. That's the key to successfully revitalising a language is for it to be used as a normal everyday language, as it once was of course. Te reo Māori was the dominant language in Aotearoa until the 1970s, so it's nothing new, so the aim is to bring it back as a language alongside English."
But even though te reo is becoming more and more normalised and seeing an increasing number of people learning the language, May said it's still endangered.
He said the key to making sure the language survives is passing it on to the younger generation.
"When smaller communities stop speaking the language to their children because they have had all these attitudes rammed down their throat - that the language is of no use or value - that's when language shift and language loss begins to occur," he said
"For te reo Māori that happened post second world war. So in the 1930s, 96 percent of Māori communities still spoke te reo Māori to their children or their children spoke te reo Māori.
"By the 1960s that was down at 26 percent, so it's actually just again normalising te reo Māori in schools for our young people, for use in places like sports, on television, radio, in the news on any topic."
With Māori becoming increasingly normalised and used more in everyday language and media, it has seen a small minority of people criticise its use.
Last month, a group of people condemned Whittaker's chocolate for celebrating Te Wiki o te Reo Māori but Kiwis hit back and pledged to buy the chocolate.
TVNZ's weather presenter Te Rauhiringa Brown received complaints from viewers for reading part of the bulletin in te reo Māori while Newshub's presenter Oriini Kaipara hit back at viewers who complained about her "offensive" moko kauae.
When asked about this latest criticism, May said this shows Māori is starting to set in and some people are worried about it.
"This is an example of what we call linguistic racism and we see quite a lot of that in New Zealand, particularly from a certain constituency of English speakers who are highly resistant to the use of te reo Māori or even to its presence," he told Newshub.
"So the fact that those attitudes are there is not a reason to stop continuing to expand the use of te reo Māori, in fact, it's exactly the reason for it because it seems to me that group, while it's very loud it's the minority of the population."
