ABSTRACT
Māori language education is known internationally as an Indigenous language revitalization success story. It began in the early 1980s as the result of a growing concern that te reo Māori, the Māori language, would be lost within a generation (see N. Benton, 1989; R. Benton, 1979, 1983). While te reo Māori had long been excluded from New Zealand schools – both in Native schools aimed predominantly at Māori and in the separate state education system 1 – it had still been nurtured in rural Māori communities up to the 1940s. Rapid urbanization of Māori people, post-World War II, was to change all that. Dislocated from their local iwi (tribe/s) and marae (tribal meeting house/s), many Māori parents in these new urban settings chose not to speak te reo Māori to their children, resulting in a generational break in the language. By the 1980s this generational fissure had become alarming, with fewer and fewer children speaking the language, and fluent Māori speakers increasingly confined to the elderly.
