Maori is an Eastern Polynesian language and an official language of New Zealand, a status granted by the Maori Language Act in 1987. It is closely related to Cook Islands Maori, Tahitian and Hawaiian. Census and survey figures suggest well over 100,000 people can hold a conversation in Maori, though fluent first-language speakers are fewer, and revival remains a live national project. The kohanga reo movement, which began in 1982 with preschool language nests run entirely in Maori, is widely credited with halting the language's decline. Maori is written in the Latin alphabet with a small inventory of consonants and five vowels, whose long forms are marked with a macron. Many Maori words, such as mana and haka, have passed into New Zealand English.
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