Judy Gill
The story of te reo Māori is often told in numbers. Advocates cite growing dictionaries, new word lists and the millions poured into language agencies. But how many words did Māori actually have at the moment of first European contact in 1769? And how does that compare to today?
The 1769 Baseline: An Elusive Estimate
When Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769 Māori was a purely oral language. Early word lists were collected by Cook’s crew and later missionaries began the process of writing them down. Some modern commentators claim that Māori had a ‘working vocabulary’ of about 8,000 words at this time.
The difficulty is that this number has no clear primary source. Linguists do not have written records from 1769 sufficiently detailed to count. Instead, estimates are usually based on comparisons with other Polynesian languages and reconstructions of what might have been spoken. In short: 8,000 words is speculative, not proven.
Growth by Borrowing and Invention
By the late-19th century, Māori had borrowed practical terms from English:
miraka (milk)
hōiho (horse)
pene (pen)
pukapuka (book)
perehi (press)
This lifted the vocabulary to perhaps 10,000–11,000 words by 1900.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, deliberate language planning drove massive growth. Today, Te Aka Māori Dictionary lists more than 24,000 headwords. Many are neologisms created by linguists to cover modern concepts:
rorohiko (computer)
manapori (democracy)
ipurangi (internet)
waea atamai (smartphone)
pūmanawa (software)
This expansion is not organic growth from communities, but the result of state-funded language engineering.
The Bureaucratic Machine
Two government agencies dominate Māori vocabulary creation:
Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (Māori Language Commission) – established in 1987 and currently receives about $36 million a year.
Te Mātāwai – established in 2016 and currently receives about $40 million a year.
Both are tasked with ‘revitalising’ the language. Much of their output overlaps, with new official word lists, campaigns and resources. The measure of success is not how many people use Māori at home but how many new words sit in a dictionary or how much funding flows through the system.
Modern Usage: A Stark Contrast
Despite the boom in official vocabulary, ordinary New Zealanders know relatively little Māori:
Non-Māori speakers have an active vocabulary of only 70–80 Māori words, mostly greetings, food and place names.
Their recognition vocabulary (words they recognise but may not use) is larger – over 1,000 items according to experimental studies.
This highlights the gap between ‘dictionary Māori’ and everyday speech.
Conclusion
The claim that Māori had 8,000 words in 1769 makes for a neat story but it rests on shaky evidence. What is clear is that te reo Māori has grown dramatically, first through borrowing and more recently through bureaucratic invention. Whether this represents genuine revitalisation or a state-sponsored exercise is a question New Zealanders continue to debate.
References:
Oh, Beckner et al. (2020). Non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders have a large “proto-lexicon” of Māori words. Nature Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78810-4
Macalister, John. (2006). Passive vocabulary use in New Zealand English. New Zealand Linguistic Society. https://nzlingsoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/macalister-2006.pdf
Te Aka Māori Dictionary. https://maoridictionary.co.nz/
