Te reo Māori, the Indigenous language of Aotearoa (New Zealand), remains ‘endangered’ despite concentrated ongoing efforts to reverse declining numbers of speakers. Most of these efforts have focused on te reo Māori immersion education settings as these were considered the most effective means to ensure the survival of the language (May & Hill, 2008). More recently, the home has been identified as an important setting for language regeneration (Te Puni Kokiri, 2011). Despite the fact that the vast majority of secondary school-aged students (both Māori and non-Māori) attend English-medium schools, these settings are seldom considered as having potential to increase numbers of te reo Māori speakers. This article reports findings from a case study of one English-medium secondary school where factors surrounding the uptake of te reo Māori as a subject were investigated. Using Spolsky and Shohamy's (2000) language policy framework as an explanatory lens, it was revealed that even when students’ language ideologies orient them towards learning te reo Māori, language management and practice decisions can discourage rather than encourage this choice.

After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, the Māori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers.