Happy birthday in Māori, and the Rā Whānau song

To say happy birthday in Māori, say Rā whānau! ‘Happy birthday!’ or Hari huritau! ‘Happy birthday!’, and to one person add ki a koe ‘to you’: Rā whānau ki a koe! ‘Happy birthday to you!’ Te Aka Māori Dictionary lists both. Rā whānau is literally the day of being born, and it means both birthday and happy birthday; hari huritau puts the word for joy in front of the word for an anniversary. Both are sung to the Happy Birthday tune, and the words of each version are below, line by line, with where they differ, why the tune is free to sing, how to ask someone’s age, the words for cake, candles and presents, and what to write in a birthday card.

Updated 19 October 2026 · 8 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

How to say happy birthday in Māori

There are two greetings, each of which can stand alone or take the person it is for. Ki a means to before a pronoun or a name, so the second half changes with how many people you are greeting:

Koe is you for one person, kōrua for two and koutou for three or more, the same three-way split the Māori pronouns guide explains. Rā whānau ki a koe! is also in the list of common Māori phrases, beside the other congratulations; this page is about everything around it.

What rā whānau and hari huritau mean

Rā is the sun, and also a day. Whānau, which most people meet as family, is first of all a verb in Te Aka: to be born, give birth. So rā whānau is the day of being born, and Te Aka glosses the pair as birthday, happy birthday, the same two words for the day and the wish. Its example is from a Māori-language newspaper of 1927: Nō te rā whānau o te Kīngi ‘On the birthday of the King’ the honours were announced. The family sense is the second one: Māori family words covers it.

Hari is to be happy, delighted, glad, and as a noun joy, happiness. Huritau is recurring annually when it describes something, and anniversary, birthday as a noun: Te Aka’s example is the Rātana temple, dedicated on the day of the founder’s 55th birthday in 1928. Put together, hari huritau is a happy anniversary, and Te Aka gives it as happy birthday. For a wedding anniversary it lists the near relative hari huringa tau, happy anniversary.

The Rā Whānau song: Māori birthday song lyrics

The Māori birthday song is the familiar tune with Māori words, and the words are a straight translation of the English. The Ministry of Education prints this version in Ka Mau te Wehi!, its te reo Māori resource for schools, in the unit “When is the dance?”, exactly as follows, stage direction and names included:

[sing song 5 times]
Rā whānau ki a koe
Rā whānau ki a koe
Rā whānau ki a Haami (Dylan, Sione, Hana, Jo)
Rā whānau ki a koe!

The names in brackets are alternatives for the third line, which is where the birthday person’s name goes. Te Aka Māori Dictionary’s example under hari huritau is the same song with the other greeting, which it prints as two sentences in a single paragraph:

Hari huritau ki a koe, hari huritau ki a koe, hari huritau ki a Pānia. Hari huritau ki a koe.

The birthday song line by line

The macrons in rā and whānau mark long vowels, as the Māori pronunciation guide explains. In the third line English adds “dear”, and Māori adds nothing: the name goes straight after ki a. To sing to a group, the Māori pronouns work here as in speech, so every koe becomes koutou: Rā whānau ki a koutou!

Where the versions differ

Neither source calls the other wrong, and both translate the song in the same way: only the greeting changes. Sing whichever your family, school or workplace already sings.

Is the Happy Birthday tune free to sing?

Yes. The melody comes from “Good Morning to All”, which the sisters Mildred and Patty Hill published in their 1893 songbook Song Stories for the Kindergarten, and its copyright had long expired. The dispute was over the English words. In 2015 the Los Angeles district judge George King ruled that the publisher Warner/Chappell did not own the lyrics and had no right to charge for their use, and in June 2016 a US judge approved a settlement under which the company paid back $14 million in licence fees and the song entered the public domain. In the European Union its copyright expired on 1 January 2017, Patty Hill having died in 1946. The Māori words above are plain translations of those English words, published for schools and in a dictionary.

How old are you? Asking someone’s age

Māori asks about age by counting years. Tau is year and also age, and e hia? is how many are there?, so:

Ō rather than tō because the years are plural: Te Aka’s tō is your for one thing, and dropping the t makes it plural, as the guide to Māori possessives sets out. The answer puts the number first and the years after it. Te Aka’s own example of an age, from a source dated 1859, describes a woman as 22 ōna tau ‘22 years old’: literally, her years are twenty-two. The numbers themselves, and how to say them, are in Māori numbers, days and months.

Birthday words: cake, candles and presents

Most of the party is borrowed from English, and Te Aka marks these as loanwords: you can hear the English in keke and kānara.

Perehana and koha are listed as synonyms, but they are not the same gift. Te Aka explains koha at length as a gift with connotations of reciprocity: in the modern context, in many tribes, it is money laid down on the marae by the visitors’ last speaker during a pōwhiri, intended for the marae and to be reciprocated some time in the future. A present handed over at a birthday is a perehana, and Te Aka’s example is just what you would say as you hand it over: Māu tēnei perehana, e hine. ‘This present is for you, my girl.’

Writing a birthday card or message in Māori

A card, a text or a post needs only three parts: the greeting, the person, and your name. Nā before a name means from, so a complete card can be as short as this:

To add warmth, the words for love are in I love you in Māori, and longer openings and sign-offs, from Kia ora to Nāku noa, nā, are taken apart word by word in Māori greetings and sign-offs. A card that will be read aloud, or said at a party, can end with the song.

Saying when you were born

Whānau, to be born, is also how you give your birth date. Te Aka’s example, from a source dated 1991, begins I whānau au ‘I was born’ and then gives the place and the date: born at Nūhaka on the 10th of May 1904. The date follows the pattern the numbers, days and months guide describes, te and the day’s number, then o and the month, so someone born on the tenth of August says I whānau au i te tekau o Ākuhata. ‘I was born on the tenth of August.’ The same guide has all twelve month names, in both the transliterated set and the maramataka names of the Māori lunar calendar.

Birthdays are greeted differently in every language, and the site has the Shanghainese ones too, in Shanghainese celebration phrases.

Going further

Everything on this page except the song itself is already vocabulary in the course: rā whānau, huritau, keke, kānara and perehana among them, alongside whānau and tau in their everyday senses. The free te reo Māori course teaches them one lesson a day, with the possessives and numbers that turn them into sentences, and the other short sayings people look up, such as what kia kaha means, have guides of their own.

Sources

1. Ministry of Education, Te Kete Ipurangi: Ka Mau te Wehi!, Unit 5 “When is the dance?”, Waiata video: Rā Whānau ki a Koe, with the PDF “Lyrics and translation for Rā Whānau ki a Koe” (Crown copyright; Internet Archive copy of 20 June 2025)
2. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rā whānau
3. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hari huritau (with the song as its example)
4. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hari huringa tau
5. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rā (sun; day)
6. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whānau (to be born; extended family)
7. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hari (to be happy; joy)
8. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: huritau (annual; anniversary, birthday)
9. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: huritau (to consider)
10. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kāri huritau
11. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hia
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tau (year, age)
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tō
14. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: taikaumātua (the example “22 ōna tau”)
15. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: keke
16. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kānara (candle)
17. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: perehana
18. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: koha
19. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakanui
20. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pāti (party)
21. Associated Press, in The Irish News: Happy Birthday song ruled public domain by US judge (28 June 2016)
22. Wikipedia: Happy Birthday to You (Good Morning to All, 1893; EU expiry 1 January 2017)