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National

Te reo Māori gets a $13 mil boost

Northland’s number one Māori media platform, Te Hiku Media, has received $13 million dollars for their Papa Reo initiative.

Papa Reo is a multimedia platform that will enable a tool where you can use te reo Māori when engaging with your digital device.

CEO Peter-Lucas Jones says it’s an innovated way to secure a digital future for te reo Māori in this digital day and age,

“Te Hiku Media will continue to play a critical role in Māori language revitalisation and iwi broadcasting by improving and maintaining native Māori language pronunciation and expression through digital innovation and Māori data sovereignty.

He also adds, “Te Hiku Media is an experienced kaitiaki of Māori data and iwi led corpus gathering campaigns for the promotion and growth of te reo Māori and tikanga Māori.”

From the station's inception in 1991, they have been committed to revitalising the native tongue and protocols of this country as well as telling their own unique tribal stories of the Northland region.

Jones says they are pleased with this award and are excited to lead the development of this initiative.

“This award celebrates the efforts of the haukāinga to innovate digitally and it recognises the work we have done over the last six years to build digital capability in the science and te reo Māori spaces.”

This investment will allow many academics linguistics experts and machine experts from all around the world to come together to create this multimedia platform, and the project team includes relationships with academic institutions who will provide supervision for PhD students and post-doctoral fellowships

New Zealand English and Pacific languages will also be included in this initiative to further support the growth of a multilingual Aotearoa.