Te Wiki o te Reo Māori – Whāngaihia te Reo ki ngā Mātua

By Education Gazette editors

Issue: Volume 94, Number 13

Posted: 27 July 2015

Reference #: 1H9crg

Whakanuia te wiki o te reo Māori – Celebrate Māori language week from July 27 – August 2, 2015.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori - Whāngaihia te Reo ki ngā Mātua

Last year Te Taura Whiri i te reo Māori in conjunction with New Zealand Post and Māori Television, launched Te Kupu o te Wiki – one Māori word per week over the year.

The late Dame Whina Cooper and her mokopuna

The campaign was hugely successful.

It achieved a goal Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori had long sought, building on the momentum from Māori Language Week to create relevance and interest throughout the year.

The theme for this year’s Te Wiki o te Reo Māori is ‘Whāngaihia te Reo ki ngā Mātua’ – to encourage and support regular and social Māori language use between parents, caregivers and children.

This year’s campaign ‘Te Rerengā Kōrero o te Wiki’ introduces a new and simple phrase each week building on last year’s one word per week.

Capturing natural conversational language, the phrases provide instant and authentic examples of Māori language for use by all parents and caregivers with children.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori runs for one week starting 27 July.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori - commemorating 40 years

In 1975, the late Dame Whina Cooper embarked on what is now widely regarded as the flashpoint on a long and continued pathway of Māori cultural reclamation. Importantly, the northern matriarch’s highly socialised protest against the continued alienation of Māori land was deliberately timed to coincide with the first Māori Language Day (later to become Māori Language Week). For Māori, land/whenua/papatūānuku and language/reo are inextricably linked.

Loss of one inevitably leads to the loss of the other.

This month Aotearoa will celebrate Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. Over 350,000 resources, information sheets, visual and audio files, and other support material will go out from Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (the Māori Language Commission) to homes, kura, schools, communities, agencies and businesses throughout the country.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori 2015 commemorates 40 years of increasing audibility and visibility for te reo Māori in everything we do.

While the annual focus celebrates the nurturing of Māori language amongst parents and whānau, Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori illuminates and commemorates 40 years of determination, struggle and consciousness with the iconic image of a kuia and her mokopuna, hand in hand, embarking on the walk of a lifetime, along a road familiar to them but untrodden by most.

Toitū te whenua, toitū te mana, toitū te reo!