English and Maori in New Zealand

At the end of the 1970s it was estimated that there were about 70,000 fluent Maori speakers in New Zealand (Benton 1979a), less than 20 per cent of the total Maori population (385,000 in 1981), or about 3 per cent of the population of the country as a whole. Practically all of the Maorispeakers would have been bilingual, and the majority of them middleaged or elderly. About half as many people again were thought to be passively bilingual (i.e., able to comprehend conversational Maori with little difficulty, but with limited speaking proficiency). A very much larger number of New Zealanders had some slight contact with the language – it had been included in the curriculum of many primary schools, for example, and had also obtained a foothold in radio broadcasting (although it did not feature regularly on television until the introduction of a five-minute daily news broadcast in Maori in 1986). However, for Maori and other New Zealanders alike, English has now long been the dominant language in most aspects of daily life.

The recent history of Maori and English in New Zealand has thus been characterised by a loss of functions by Maori on the one hand, and a corresponding expansion of functions (amounting often to an almost complete takeover) by English, on the other, within the former Maori speech community (cf. Metge 1964; Benton 1979a, 1979b, 1984a, 1986).