Te Reo Māori

Te reo Māori is an Eastern Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, spoken in New Zealand. Its speakers descend from voyagers who sailed from eastern Polynesia, the legendary Hawaiki, and settled New Zealand by about 1350; they developed regional dialects and an unwritten culture of genealogical recitation, songs and the haka.

The language had no script until European contact, which began with Captain James Cook in 1769. Between 1817 and 1830 missionaries, Māori chiefs such as Hongi Hika and the linguist Samuel Lee fixed an orthography in the Latin alphabet.

William Colenso printed the first books produced in New Zealand at Paihia in 1833, and his Māori New Testament of 1837 was the first Bible translation into an indigenous language published in the southern hemisphere. Māori then became a language of worship, newspapers and political meetings.