Poroporoaki: Māori farewell speeches and words

A poroporoaki ‘farewell’ is a Māori farewell: the word means to take leave of, to farewell, and also the farewell speech itself, whether it is spoken over someone who has died or to a colleague on their last day at work. At work a poroporoaki usually runs in this order: an opening, an acknowledgement of the person and their work, thanks, good wishes for what comes next, a song and a reply from the person leaving, and a close. Below are the meanings, that structure with lines you can use for each part, what the leaver says back, and a card message to copy.

Updated 22 October 2026 · 11 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.

Poroporoaki examples: the short version

Every line is explained below, with where it comes from. Where a line is built from the grammar our course teaches rather than quoted from a published source, the page says so.

What does poroporoaki mean?

Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives poroporoaki two senses:

Its example of the first sense is about the living: a family who stood one night to farewell the people returning home to fetch their wives and families. The shorter poroaki ‘to take leave, farewell’ means the same, and Te Aka quotes it in a report from 1926 where the farewell is a call of Haere rā! Haere rā!

The broadest definition comes from the broadcaster Wiremu Parker, in a radio talk held by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision: a poroporoaki is any formal speech of farewell. The best-known kind is the farewell to the dead, where the finest oratory is heard, but poroporoaki are also addressed to the living at farewell functions, when someone is going home or overseas, or after a hui ‘meeting, gathering’. He adds that waiata are still a form of poroporoaki, and that poroporoaki are written too, in letters, in magazines and at the end of books: a farewell can be written as well as spoken.

The two main uses

At a tangihanga

Speakers at a tangihanga ‘funeral’ farewell the person who has died, speaking to them directly, as though they were alive. RNZ’s introduction to its whaikōrero recordings describes the classical shape of these speeches in three parts: the tau ‘introduction’, with an opening call, a chant or karakia, and greetings to the dead and then to the living; the kaupapa ‘body’, which develops a theme fitting the person’s life, adds proverbs, and ends with the final farewell to them; and a short whakamutunga ‘conclusion’, sometimes followed by a lament. What to say to a grieving family, and what moe mai rā means, are in condolences in Māori.

At the end of a hui, and when someone leaves

On a marae, Te Ara says, the end of a hui is marked by formal farewells called poroporoaki, and it is usual for the visitors to begin them: it is good manners to let visitors leave when they are ready, and impolite for the hosts to tell them to go. Researchers who ran their meetings by tikanga quote Cleve Barlow’s description of this closing poroporoaki: a chance to go back over what happened at the hui, talk about what came of it, and express the hope that everyone will continue on their way “in peace and happiness”.

Schools and workplaces use the same word for farewelling a person who is leaving: a colleague moving on, a teacher or a pupil leaving a school. The welcome at the other end of someone’s time, the pōwhiri or whakatau, is explained in pōwhiri explained, and the other Māori words a workplace uses are in Māori words you’ll hear at work.

A poroporoaki speech at work, part by part

There is no single official order for a workplace farewell. The table below sets out the parts that the published protocols have in common: two schools’ written procedures for farewelling a leaver (Puni School and Rāwhiti School), Barlow’s description of the poroporoaki at the end of a hui, and RNZ’s outline of a formal speech. Your own workplace may already have a way of doing it, and that comes first.

Opening and closing karakia, with their words and meanings, are in karakia for meetings. If you are asked to introduce yourself as part of the opening, that is a pepeha. At Puni School the whole school stands to support the speaker with a haka, and sings as the leaver walks down the line. Songs sung in support of a speaker, and which ones suit a farewell, are the subject of waiata tautoko.

Where the accounts differ: who speaks first

The settings differ: on a marae the people leaving are guests, while at a school or office farewell the people staying are usually the hosts. If you are organising one, ask who in your workplace normally leads, and give the person leaving the chance to speak before the close.

Lines for each part

These are short lines a learner can say with confidence. Each one names its source; the ones marked built are made from patterns the course teaches, not quoted from a speech.

1. Opening: greeting the room

2. Acknowledging the person

Mihi is the key word here. Te Aka’s meanings are to greet, pay tribute, acknowledge, thank, so one word covers greeting the person, honouring their work and thanking them. After the line in Māori you can carry on in English about what the person did: the projects, the people they looked after, the things only they knew how to fix.

3. Thanks

Mahi takes the a possessives, tāu mahi ‘your work’ in the course, and āu is the same word for more than one thing, so āu mahi katoa is all your work. Why some things take a and others o is explained in Māori possessives. Manaakitanga is hospitality and care for others, the value many workplaces name.

4. Wishes for the future

All of these are kia wishes: kia plus a state, let it be good, let it be strong. Kia kaha has a page of its own: what kia kaha means. In Kia pai te haere, haere is the noun, the journey, one of Te Aka’s senses of the word.

5. Closing

NZTE’s Māori cultural kit gives these three lines as “a simple closing for all speeches”, with its own English:

The lines set the dead apart (them to themselves) and turn to the living (us to ourselves). RNZ places the greetings to the dead and to the living in the opening of a formal speech; NZTE offers this version as a close. If you only need one line to finish, Tēnā koutou katoa is enough, and the simplest close of all is Haere rā to the person leaving.

A short poroporoaki for a colleague

Put together, a farewell from a team member who is still learning might run like this, Māori and English side by side. Change the name and the details.

What the person leaving says

The reply is the leaver’s turn to thank the people they worked with and to talk about their time there, as Puni School’s protocol puts it. Because they are the one going, their farewell is the other one of the pair: E noho rā ‘farewell, to those who stay’, not haere rā. Why the pair works that way is explained in Māori greetings and sign-offs.

If the leaver says goodbye by email instead, Te Aka’s noho ora mai ‘stay well’ is the right sign-off, since it is said only to someone staying, and Victoria University of Wellington renders it all the best.

A farewell card message in Māori

A card goes to the person leaving, so it uses haere rā and the wishes above.

From one colleague

Kia ora e Mere,
It has been a joy working with you. We will all feel the gap.
Kia ora rawa atu mō tō manaakitanga.
Kia pai tāu mahi hou!
Ngā mihi nui, nā Hone

From the whole team

Tēnā koe, e Pita,
Thank you for thirty years of steady hands and good humour. Enjoy every day of retirement.
Kia ora rawa atu mō āu mahi katoa.
Haere rā, kia pai te haere.
Nā mātou katoa

Nā mātou katoa (from all of us) is built from nā before the signer and the course’s mātou katoa ‘all of us, not including you’; mātou leaves the reader out, which is right, because the card is to them.

Words for leaving and farewells

Te Aka’s example for wehe is a musician who, around the age of 18, ka wehe atu ia ki Ingarangi ‘departed for England’ to study.

Going further

Haere rā, e noho rā, ngā mihi, kia kaha and the mō tō … pattern for thanking someone are all taught in our free te reo Māori course, with Papa Reo’s native-speaker voice.

Sources

1. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: poroporoaki (both senses)
2. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: poroaki
3. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: wehe (sense 2, to leave, depart)
4. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: haere (sense 5, journey; sense 7, goodbye, farewell)
5. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: haerenga (journey, trip, parting)
6. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rītaia (to retire)
7. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mihi (to greet, pay tribute, acknowledge, thank)
8. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ngā mihi (acknowledgements; thank you)
9. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tēnā koe (hello, to one person; thank you)
10. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kia kaha (be strong, keep going)
11. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: haere rā (said to someone leaving)
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: noho ora mai (said to someone staying)
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: āpiti (to add, put together)
14. Basil Keane, ‘Te kawa o te marae – Pōwhiri process’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (poroporoaki at the end of a hui)
15. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision: Poroporoaki / Wiremu Parker (catalogue description)
16. RNZ: Whaikōrero collection, Poroporoaki – Introduction
17. Tipene-Matua, Phillips, Cram, Parsons and Taupo, ‘Old ways of having new conversations: Basing qualitative research within Tikanga Māori’ (2009), quoting Barlow, Tikanga Whakaaro (1991), p. 96
18. New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, Te Kete Tikanga Māori: Poroporoaki – Farewells (archived 27 December 2016)
19. Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington: Māori greetings and phrases
20. Puni School: Poroporoaki – Farewell (the school’s protocol for farewelling a leaver)
21. Rāwhiti School: Poroporoaki (the school’s end-of-year protocol)