How many people speak Māori? The census figures

In New Zealand’s 2023 Census, 213,849 people said they could hold a conversation about a lot of everyday things in te reo Māori: 4.3% of the population, and more than for any other language except English. That is up from 185,955 in 2018 and 148,395 in 2013. The figure is self-reported, and it counts confident learners and native speakers alike.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 9 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.

The short answer

Stats NZ’s count from the last three censuses, for everyone usually living in New Zealand:

Census	People who could hold an everyday conversation in te reo Māori
2013	148,395
2018	185,955
2023	213,849 (4.3% of the population)

Between 2018 and 2023 the number rose by 27,894 people, or 15.0%, and over the ten years from 2013 by more than 65,000. After English, te reo Māori is the most widely spoken language in New Zealand. New Zealand Sign Language, the other official language, had nearly 25,000 users in the same census.

Where people live makes a large difference. The Gisborne region had the highest share of speakers, 16.9%, followed by Northland at 10.1%; those are also the two regions with the largest Māori populations.

What the census number actually measures

The census asks which languages a person could have a conversation in about a lot of everyday things, and the answer is the judgement of whoever fills in the form. Nobody is tested. The same tick covers a grandparent who grew up speaking Māori at home, a ten-year-old who has been through kōhanga reo ‘language nest’ and kura kaupapa Māori ‘Māori-language immersion school’, and an adult who has studied for two years and feels ready to say Ka taea e koe te kōrero Māori? ‘Can you speak Māori?’ and keep going.

So the census is a measure of confident conversational ability, not of fluency. It can be pulled either way: some people with good Māori are modest about it, and some with a little are generous. The government’s own language strategy, the Maihi Karauna, places the census standard at about the middle of a five-point scale, roughly “I can talk about some things in Māori”, below “many things” and “almost anything”.

For a learner, the useful reading is this: the bar is everyday conversation, not public speaking or formal oratory. How many words that takes is the subject of how many Māori words you need.

How many Māori speak te reo Māori?

In 2023, 18.6% of people of Māori descent could hold a conversation in te reo Māori, out of 978,246 people of Māori descent counted. That share has barely moved. Data on iwi members published by Te Kāhui Raraunga put it at 18.4% in 2013 and 18.6% in 2023, as RNZ reported. The number of speakers grew because the Māori population grew, and Te Kāhui Raraunga’s lead technician advised looking at the number of speakers rather than the percentage, because the census changed how it counts people between 2013 and 2023.

Not everyone welcomes the flat line. The te reo Māori educator Rawiri Wright told RNZ: “Numerically, there are more speakers of Māori now than there probably have ever been, but my concern is those of us who are Māori who have our own language because it is our birthright.”

The age profile is the hopeful part. Of iwi members who could kōrero Māori in 2023, 49% were tamariki ‘children’, rangatahi ‘young people’ and young adults under 30.

Older figures are often quoted for the Māori ethnic group, which is smaller than the group of everyone with Māori descent, so the percentages are not directly comparable. In the 2013 Census, 125,352 people of Māori ethnicity, 21.3%, could hold a conversation about a lot of everyday things in te reo Māori, a 4.8% decrease from the 2006 Census.

How well do people speak it?

The census asks one yes-or-no question. Two Stats NZ surveys ask how well, on a scale, and they show how much ability sits below the census bar:

Survey	Who was asked	What it found
Te Kupenga 2018	About 8,500 Māori adults	57% could understand te reo Māori and 48% could speak more than a few words or phrases; more than 1 in 6 could speak it at least fairly well
General Social Survey 2018	New Zealand adults (15+)	24% could speak more than a few words or phrases; 6.1% at least fairly well
General Social Survey 2021	New Zealand adults (15+)	30% could speak more than a few words or phrases; 7.9% at least fairly well

In Te Kupenga 2018, Māori aged 15 to 24 were among the most likely to speak te reo at least fairly well (19.7%), along with those aged 55 and over (18.8%). The younger group had more often learned it in immersion schooling such as kōhanga reo, kura kaupapa Māori or wharekura ‘Māori-language secondary school’; the older group mostly at home. Stats NZ reported in 2021 that 23% of Māori said te reo Māori was one of their first languages, up from 17% in 2018.

These are different surveys asked in different ways, and none of them should be set beside the census count as a single trend. Together they show a large band of people who understand more than they speak, and who say He iti taku reo. ‘I have only a little.’

How close te reo Māori came to being lost

At the start of the 20th century most Māori still spoke only Māori. Te Ara, the government’s encyclopedia of New Zealand, describes a fairly stable bilingualism until the 1930s, with Māori at home and on the marae and English at school and work, and then a significant decline in speakers between 1920 and 1960. Children were sometimes punished for speaking Māori at school. After the Second World War Māori moved to the cities in large numbers: about 75% had lived in rural areas before the war, and two decades later about 60% lived in urban centres, where English was the language of work, school and everything else.

The scale of the loss was measured by the researcher Richard Benton. Between 1973 and 1979 his team at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research interviewed members of 6,470 Māori families throughout the North Island, covering 33,338 people. The figure that mattered most was the children. Of 4,090 households where the youngest child still lived at home, only 170 rated that child a fluent speaker of Māori; even adding the 152 whose youngest understood Māori fairly well, the total came to less than 8%. Except in a very few communities, Benton wrote, Māori had become basically “a language spoken between consenting adults”.

When the Waitangi Tribunal reported on te reo in 1986, it cited the survey: “The extent of the threat to language survival was graphically illustrated by Dr Benton’s description of language loss in nearly all the traditional villages.” By the 1980s, according to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, fewer than 20% of Māori knew enough te reo to be regarded as native speakers.

The revival, year by year

The recovery was started by Māori, and much of the machinery the government later funded was built by communities first:

Year	What happened
1972	Ngā Tamatoa and the Te Reo Māori Society collect more than 30,000 signatures on a petition to Parliament asking for Māori to be offered in schools. Māori Language Day begins the same year, and becomes Māori Language Week in 1975.
1978	Rūātoki opens as New Zealand’s first officially bilingual school.
1982	The first kōhanga reo, Pukeatua, opens in Wainuiomata. Within five years the number of kōhanga had risen from 5 to more than 500, according to Benton.
1980s	Kura kaupapa Māori, full-immersion primary schools, open for kōhanga graduates, the first being Te Kura Kaupapa o Hoani Waititi in Auckland. Wharekura, immersion secondary schools, follow.
1986	On the Te Reo Māori claim (Wai 11), the Waitangi Tribunal recommends that the language be recognised as a taonga ‘treasure’ under the Treaty of Waitangi and as an official language.
1987	The Māori Language Act makes Māori an official language and sets up Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, the Māori Language Commission. The Māori radio station Te Upoko o Te Ika is piloted the same year.
1993	Te Māngai Pāho is set up to fund Māori-language broadcasting.
2004	Māori Television begins, known since 2022 as Whakaata Māori; its all-Māori Te Reo channel follows in 2008.
2016	Te Ture mō Te Reo Māori 2016, the Māori Language Act 2016, recognises iwi and Māori as kaitiaki ‘guardians’ of the language, sets up Te Mātāwai to represent them, and requires a Crown strategy alongside a Māori one.
2019	The Crown’s strategy, the Maihi Karauna, sets targets for 2040.

Te Kupenga’s age figures above are the result of this table. The rangatahi most likely to speak te reo well are the first generation that could go from kōhanga reo to wharekura without leaving the language.

The target: one million speakers by 2040

The Maihi Karauna, published by Te Puni Kōkiri in February 2019, sets three goals for 2040:

85% of New Zealanders (or more) will value te reo Māori as a key part of national identity.
1,000,000 New Zealanders (or more) will have the ability and confidence to talk about at least basic things in te reo Māori.
150,000 Māori aged 15 and over will use te reo Māori as much as English.

The million is often misread as a million census speakers. It is a lower bar. “Basic”, as the strategy defines it, means brief, meaningful exchanges about common experiences: someone who could greet another person, ask after them and their family, say where they are from and what their job is, and ask for directions. That matches level 2 of the strategy’s five-point scale, “simple/basic things”, one below the level it likens to the census. The strategy itself estimated, from the 2016 General Social Survey, that 15% of New Zealand adults could already speak basic te reo Māori, “about 800,000 New Zealanders if children are included”.

The third goal is the harder one. Its baseline, from Te Kupenga 2013, was about 70,000 Māori adults who spoke te reo somewhere, at home or outside it, as much as English; the target more than doubles that.

How many people speak Māori outside New Zealand?

Outside New Zealand, the clearest count comes from Australia. In its 2021 Census, 14,618 people used Māori at home, and 170,057 gave Māori as an ancestry. The question is different from New Zealand’s: it asks what language a person uses at home, not what they could hold a conversation in, so it misses speakers who live in English-speaking households and cannot be added to the New Zealand figure.

So is te reo Māori a big language or a small one?

By world standards it is small: a little over 200,000 confident speakers, almost all in one country. By New Zealand standards it is the second language of the country, and one that most New Zealanders meet daily without speaking it, in greetings like Kia ora ‘hello, thank you’ and in the names on every map, which Māori place names takes apart.

For a learner the practical consequence is the one set out in is te reo Māori hard to learn: the language is regular and quick to read, but conversation partners have to be sought out. The free te reo Māori course starts with the most common Māori words and builds to the everyday conversation the census asks about, beginning with Kei te ako au i te reo Māori. ‘I’m learning te reo Māori.’ For how far a limited vocabulary goes in any language, see how many words you need.