New Zealand’s Māori language commissioner has described government policies to limit the use of the Indigenous language in the public service as “a risk” to the half-century effort to revive it.
“Any affront to the efforts that we have been making has to be taken seriously,” the commissioner, Prof Rawinia Higgins, told the Guardian. “We’re seeing a reaction – only from a small corner of people, but enough that we don’t want that to snowball.”