New research shows around one in 25 people in New Zealand can speak the Māori language, teo reo Māori. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images
Prof Rawinia Higgins tells the Guardian that te reo Māori is under threat from the rightwing coalition despite long-running efforts to revive it.
New Zealand’s Māori language commissioner has described government policies to limit the use of the Indigenous language in the public service as “a risk” to the half-century effort to revive it.
“Any affront to the efforts that we have been making has to be taken seriously,” the commissioner, Prof Rawinia Higgins, told the Guardian. “We’re seeing a reaction – only from a small corner of people, but enough that we don’t want that to snowball.”