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Is the Language Endangered?
Yes, Cook Islands Māori is an endangered language. Fewer than 50,000 people are estimated to speak it, and numbers have been steadily decreasing over the past decades. Many young Cook Islanders now grow up speaking only English.
Impact of Westernisation
Western influences have had a major impact on the Cook Islands. The introduction of English as the primary language in education, media, and public life has diminished the daily use of Cook Islands Māori. This trend continues today, fuelled by migration, tourism, and global media, threatening the survival of the language.
Why is the Language Important?
- It is a crucial part of Cook Islands identity and culture.
- It carries traditional knowledge, values, and stories.
- Language strengthens community ties and connects generations.
- Losing the language means losing a unique worldview.
Keeping Cook Islands Māori alive is vital for cultural pride and heritage.
How Can Technology Help?
- Online resources and mobile apps can make language learning accessible to anyone, anywhere.
- Social media and video platforms allow sharing of conversations, stories, and songs in Māori.
- Digital dictionaries and games can engage young people and help keep the language vibrant.
- Technology connects the diaspora, making revitalisation a global movement.
By using technology, we can ensure Cook Islands Māori is not only preserved but revitalised for future generations.
Our Government Departments and Local Businesses Must Lead
A language does not survive in a dictionary. It survives in the home — and much of the home is now a screen, carried in a pocket and read a hundred times a day. Cook Islands Māori will live or die on the things people actually read: the form at the counter, the menu on the wall, the sign in the shop, the website they open for an answer.
Each of these is a place where Cook Islands Māori should stand beside English. Yet across Rarotonga, it is almost entirely absent. This is not because the language lacks words. Te Kōpapa Reo Māori has created them for years: vairanga tiorangi, kupu tāviri, 'Uipā'anga ata veka uira. What is missing is not vocabulary but visibility places for people to encounter, recognise, and use these words.
The Cook Islands Parliament has already shown it can be done
Every item on the Parliament of the Cook Islands website carries its Māori name alongside the English one.
Go and look for yourself
Open these in another tab. They belong to six different organisations, built by different people at different times.
Now notice what they have in common. Every one of them is built from the same small set of labels:
That is the whole task — about a dozen words. Not a translation project without end, but a short list every organisation in the country already uses. Agree on it once and a person who meets ʻĀtui mai on a health page recognises it on a bank page, then on a form at the counter, then on a sign in a shop. They are not studying. They are simply reading, and the same handful of words keeps arriving until it is theirs. Recognition becomes familiarity; familiarity becomes use.
Parliament has already settled two of them. And this is closer than it looks: the Ministry of Health is Te Marae Ora — its own name is in the language. The Bank of the Cook Islands already sells a Vaka Debit Mastercard and runs an app called TakuBCI, so the reo is on its products and in its customers' pockets already. Carrying it onto the buttons is a smaller step than the one each has taken.
It works inward as well as outward. Staff who see these words every day in their own systems begin using them at the counter and on the phone, and a customer hears the language from the person serving them rather than only reading it on a screen. One decision, taken once, reaches every person who works there and everyone they serve.
If the House of Parliament can do it, then every ministry can do it. The Ministry of Cultural Development needs to lead.
Health. Education. Justice. Finance. Internal Affairs. Every department serving Cook Islands people has a responsibility to serve them in their own language. And that responsibility extends beyond government. Banks, shops, tour operators, cafés and resorts trade on Cook Islands culture every day. Bilingual signs, menus, receipts and websites require little investment, yet return something essential to the place and the people that make those businesses possible.
The impact is not merely symbolic. It is practical. A word people never encounter is a word they will never use. Put kupu tāviri beside “password” on a login page. Put reinga tutaki beside “EFTPOS” at the counter. Put 'akakite'anga beside “information” on a government form. Then, without a lesson or a lecture, the country begins to learn its language again.
That is how a new term becomes a living word: not by being stored in a dictionary, but by being repeated in the ordinary moments of everyday life.
Our language will not be saved by the people who speak it best. It will be saved by the institutions that put it in front of everyone else — every day, on every screen, until using it is simply normal again.
New Words for a New World
A living language needs words for things that did not exist when it was young. Te Kōpapa Reo Māori, the Cook Islands Māori Language Commission, creates them — vairanga tiorangi for iCloud, 'Uipā'anga ata veka uira for a Zoom meeting, Reinga Akakaiou for a credit card.
Browse the glossary → 273 terms across 22 categories, searchable in English or Māori — macrons and the amata optional.
Everyday Words & Phrases
The glossary holds the new and the specialist. This is the reo you need on an ordinary day: how to greet someone, name your family, count, order food, name a part of the body, say what colour something is — 836 words and phrases across 35 categories, grouped the way you would teach them.
Above them sit the au araara mou, the sayings that refuse to translate. Topa te tipi is not "the knife fell"; it means you are completely worn out. Kare pā ki te mata is not about eyes; it means the thing is an eye-sore. Fifteen of these, and they are the hardest part of the language to get from a dictionary — which is exactly why they are here.
All of it comes from spreadsheets you can add to at any time, and the page updates itself.
