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The 2018 New Zealand census reported that about 190,000 people, or 4% of the population, could hold an everyday conversation in Māori. As of 2015, 55% of Māori adults reported some knowledge of the language; of these, 64% use Māori at home and around 50,000 people can speak the language "well". [10]
There were 887,493 people identifying as being part of the Māori ethnic group at the 2023 New Zealand census, making up 17.8% of New Zealand's population. [114] This is an increase of 111,657 people (14.4%) since the 2013 census, and an increase of 288,891 people (48.3%) since the 2006 census.
Almost the entire population speak it either as native speakers or proficiently as a second language. [1] The New Zealand English dialect is most similar to Australian English in pronunciation, with some key differences. The Māori language of the indigenous Māori people was made the first de jure official language in 1987.
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Māori were discouraged from speaking their own language in schools and work places and it existed as a community language only in a few remote areas. [91] The language underwent a revival beginning in the 1970s, and now more people speak Māori. [92] [93] The future of the language was the subject of a claim before the Waitangi Tribunal in 1985.
Many Polynesian languages have been greatly affected by European colonization. Both Māori and Hawaiian, for example, have lost many speakers to English, and only since the 1990s have they resurged in popularity. [12] [13]
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.
They speak the Polynesian languages, a branch of the Oceanic subfamily within the Austronesian language family. The Indigenous Māori people form the largest Polynesian population, [ 9 ] followed by Samoans , Native Hawaiians , Tahitians , Tongans , and Cook Islands Māori .