Chapter 4: Maori Language Survival and New Zealand Education

In New Zealand since the early 1980s, successive governments have supported the establishment of a nationwide Maori language education system as part of the creation of a Maori-Pakeha (settler-descendant) bicultural nation. Government-funded Maori language education is increasingly available to those who wish to learn the Maori language or who wish their children to receive bilingual or total immersion education in the language. The renewed interest in the Maori language is to ensure the survival of the language and to support a range of Maori cultural revival aspirations. Such cultural revival objectives, along with compensation settlements for colonial injustices, are the basis for the bicultural project that has framed government policy in respect to Maori since the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act.