Te reo Māori becomes an official language
Te Ture mō Te Reo Māori
- When
- 1 August 1987
- Reach
- Nationwide
Te reo Māori gained official status and the right to be spoken in court, fifteen years after the language petition and following a Waitangi Tribunal finding that it was a taonga.
The Tribunal’s 1986 report on the Te Reo Māori claim held that the language was a taonga the Crown was obliged to protect under Article Two, and that it had actively harmed it. The Act followed, creating Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori. Kōhanga reo were already running from 1982 and kura kaupapa from 1985; Māori Television followed in 2004. Speaker numbers have stabilised but the language remains at risk.
Regions affected
Sources
Written for this project from these references rather than copied from them. Follow a link to check the account against the original.
Related
The great Māori urban migration
Māori went from about 25 percent urban in 1945 to nearly 80 percent by 1975 — one of the fastest urbanisations recorded anywhere.
The Sealord fisheries settlement
The Crown funded a Māori half-share in Sealord and allocated quota, settling commercial fisheries claims nationally in one deal.
The Māori land march
Te Rōpū o te Matakite
Whina Cooper, aged 79, led a month-long hīkoi from Te Hāpua in the far north to Parliament under the slogan ‘not one more acre’.
Te HāpuaThe influenza pandemic
About 9,000 people died in two months — roughly half as many as died in four years of war. Māori died at more than seven times the Pākehā rate.