[6][7] Māori declined due to the increase of the European population and government-imposed educational policies; by the early 20th century its use was banned in school playgrounds and classrooms across the country.

The number of speakers fell sharply after 1945,[8] but a Māori language revival movement began in the late 20th century and slowed the decline.

[12][13] Māori is known for its metaphorical poetry and prose,[14][15] often in the form of karakia, whaikōrero, whakapapa and karanga, and in performing arts such as mōteatea, waiata, and haka.

[27] A 1994 ruling by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (then New Zealand's highest court) held the Government responsible under the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) for the preservation of the language.

[31] During New Zealand First's successful campaign to return to Parliament in 2023, party leader Winston Peters ridiculed the proposal as "ideological mumbo jumbo"[32] and criticised the use of the name in government reports.

"[35] As part of its coalition agreement with New Zealand First, the National-led government agreed to ensure all public service departments had their primary name in English except for those specifically related to Māori.

According to historian Atholl Anderson, whakapapa used "mnemonic devices, repetitive patterns [and] rhyme" to leave a lasting impression.

"Casting knowledge in formulaic or other standarised story forms.. helped to fix the information in the minds of speakers and listeners".

[51] This was followed in 1880 by the Native Schools Code, which placed further restrictions on the use of Māori, establishing the expectation that teachers would have some knowledge of the language solely for the purpose of teaching English to younger pupils.

Further restrictions on Māori followed, to the point that in the early twentieth century, children were forbidden to speak it in the classroom or playground, under penalty of corporal punishment.

The "Kia Ora Incident" was the subject of public and political scrutiny before having her job reinstated by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, and became a major symbol of long-standing linguicism in New Zealand.

[60] This included Māori-language revitalization programs such as the Kōhanga Reo movement, which from 1982 immersed infants in Māori from infancy to school age.

The Waitangi Tribunal in 2011 identified a suggestion for language revitalisation that would shift indigenous policies from the central government to the preferences and ideologies of the Māori people.

Businesses, including Google, Microsoft, Vodafone NZ and Fletcher Building, were quick to adopt the trend as it became apparent that using te reo made customers think of a company as "committed to New Zealand".

[75][76] Also in 2019, Kotahi Rau Pukapuka Trust and Auckland University Press began work on publishing a sizeable library of local and international literature in the language, including the Harry Potter books.

[79][80][81] While the preceding are all distinct languages, they remain similar enough that Tupaia, a Tahitian travelling with Captain James Cook in 1769–1770, communicated effectively with Māori.

Attempts to write Māori words using the Latin script began with Captain James Cook and other early explorers, with varying degrees of success.

Thomas Kendall published a book in 1815 entitled A korao no New Zealand, which in modern orthography and usage would be He Kōrero nō Aotearoa.

Beginning in 1817, professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University worked with the Ngāpuhi chief Tītore and his junior relative Tui (also known as Tuhi or Tupaea),[92] and then with chief Hongi Hika[93] and his junior relative Waikato; they established a definitive orthography based on Northern usage, published as the First Grammar and Vocabulary of the New Zealand Language (1820).

Occasional and inconsistent vowel-length markings occur in 19th-century manuscripts and newspapers written by Māori, including macron-like diacritics and doubling of letters.

Māori writer Hare Hongi (Henry Stowell) used macrons in his Maori-English Tutor and Vade Mecum of 1911,[97] as does Sir Āpirana Ngata (albeit inconsistently) in his Maori Grammar and Conversation (7th printing 1953).

Another allophone is the voiceless bilabial fricative, IPA [ɸ], which is usually supposed to be the sole pre-European pronunciation, although linguists are not sure of the truth of this supposition.

All possible CV combinations are grammatical, though wo, who, wu, and whu occur only in a few loanwords from English such as wuru, "wool" and whutuporo, "football".

Some speakers also reduce this sound to ⟨h⟩, particularly in words beginning with the causative prefix whaka- (e.g. Whakarongo), leading to the pronunciation being heard as haka- (e.g. Hakarongo or 'hakarongo).

[132] This same elision is found in numerous other southern placenames, such as the two small settlements called The Kaik (from the term for a fishing village, kāinga in standard Māori), near Palmerston and Akaroa, and the early spelling of Lake Wakatipu as Wagadib.

They include: Locative particles (prepositions) refer to position in time and/or space, and include: Possessives fall into one of two classes of prepositions marked by a and o, depending on the dominant versus subordinate relationship between possessor and possessed: ngā tamariki a te matua, the children of the parent but te matua o ngā tamariki, the parent of the children.

"Demonstratives occur after the noun and have a deictic function, and include tēnei, this (near me), tēnā, that (near you), tērā, that (far from us both), and taua, the aforementioned (anaphoric).

[163] Phrases introduced by demonstratives can also be expressed using the definite article te or ngā preceding a noun followed by one of the deictic particles nei, nā or rā.

For dual and plural subject pronouns, the possessive form is analytical, by just putting the possessive particle (tā/tō for singular objects or ā/ō for plural objects) before the personal pronouns, e.g. tā tātou karaihe (our class), tō rāua whare (their [dual] house); ā tātou karaihe (our classes).

The Māori phrase kia kaha, "be strong", is frequently encountered as an indication of moral support for someone starting a stressful undertaking or otherwise in a difficult situation.