Benton reports on te reo Māori to be accessible to all online
Thursday 14 September 2017 - Between 1973-1979 Richard and Nena Benton led the first sociolinguistic survey of te reo Māori in New Zealand.
Publications from the research include a set of 143 booklets that report on each community involved. Until now, these
booklets have been difficult to access, but NZCER has digitised them and made them freely available online.
NZCER is pleased to be able to return the reports to the whānau, communities, hapū and iwi that participated in this
survey 40 years ago.
Fluent te reo speakers went into the homes of almost 6,500 whānau of over 30,000 people to research the state of te reo
Māori in the 1970s. The Benton survey, as it came to be known, demonstrated the perilous state of te reo Māori. The
survey was undertaken by Te Wāhanga unit at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, led by Dr Richard Benton.
This seminal research is a key milestone in the history of the Māori language, according to the Te Taura Whiri i te Reo
Māori – the Māori language commission. The research had significant impact, with the Waitangi Tribunal te reo Māori
report of 1986 noting:
“The survival of the Maori language in the 20th century had come to depend on the existence of isolated rural
communities and traditional villages where Maori still predominated and was the medium of social interaction in the home
and in community discussions. 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. It is now apparent that the expectation that the
language would survive because of those villages is not realistic.”
The Waitangi Tribunal Report recommended that legislation and a supervising body for te reo be put in place, and in 1987
the Māori Language Act 1987 and Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori were established.
Individuals are not identified in the reports, but their voices are heard. The reports document widespread evidence that
Māori students were punished for speaking te reo Māori at school and many people noted that they did not teach te reo
Māori to their children because, “I didn’t want them to go through the same punishment I went through for speaking
Maori.”
Following Benton’s tradition, Te Wāhanga has recently published further research about the health of te reo Māori in
homes and communities. Te Ahu o te reo Māori was commissioned by Te Taura Whiri i te reo Māori and explores how whānau
in nine communities are working to re-establish or maintain te reo Māori as a normal means of communication in daily
life. In his report, Benton noted that the death of a language occurs following the passing away of “the last person to
learn it as a child”. Te Ahu o te reo Māori found that, “In all of the communities involved... there were some whānau...
who were frequently using te reo Māori inter- and intra-generationally.” This was not the case in some communities at
the time that the Benton survey was carried out, and is an encouraging sign for te reo Māori now.
See the reports on the NZCER website:
http://www.nzcer.org.nz/survey-language-use-m-ori-households-and-communities-1973-1978-reports-participants
ENDS