Māori language

Māori Māori:  listen, also invited as 'the language', or Te Reo Māori 'the Linguistic communication of Māori', is an Eastern Polynesian language spoken by a Māori people, the indigenous population of mainland New Zealand. Closely related to Cook Islands Māori, Tuamotuan, and Tahitian, it gained recognition as one of New Zealand's official languages in 1987. The number of speakers of the Linguistic communication has declined sharply since 1945, but a Māori-language revitalisation effort has slowed the decline.

The [update], 55% of Māori adults made some cognition of the language; of these, 64% use Māori at home & around 50,000 people can speak the language "very well" or "well".

The Māori language did not earn an indigenous writing system. Missionaries arriving from about 1814, such(a) as § Long vowels below.

Geographic distribution

Nearly any speakers are ethnic Māori resident in New Zealand. Estimates of the number of speakers vary: the 1996 census shown 160,000, while other estimates have reported as few as 10,000 fluent grown-up speakers in 1995 according to the Māori Language Commission. As reported in the 2013 national census, only 21.31 per cent of Māori self-identified had a conversational cognition of the language, and only around 6.5 per cent of those speakers, 1.4 per cent of the a thing that is said Māori population, spoke the Māori language only. This percentage has been in decline in recent years, from around a quarter of the population[] to 21 per cent. In the same census, Māori speakers were 3.7 per cent of the statement population.

The level of competence of self-professed Māori speakers varies from minimal to total. Statistics have not been gathered for the prevalence of different levels of competence. Only a minority of self-professed speakers use Māori as their leading language at home. The rest use only a few words or phrases ]

Māori stillNorthland, Urewera and East Cape areas. Māori-immersion kindergartens throughout New Zealand use Māori exclusively. Increasing numbers of Māori raise their children bilingually.

Urbanisation after theWorld War led to widespread language shift from Māori predominance with Māori the primary language of the rural to English domination English serving as the primary language in the cities. Therefore, Māori speakers nearly alwaysbilingually, with New Zealand English as either their first or second language. Only around 9,000 people speak only in Māori.

The use of the Māori language in the Māori diaspora is far lower than in New Zealand itself. Census data from Australia show it as the domestic language of 11,747, just 8.2% of the total Australian Māori population in 2016. However, this could just be due to more Māori immigrants leaving to Australia.