Ka Ngaro Te Reo

Ka ngaro te reo, ka ngaro taua, pera i te ngaro o te moa. If the language be lost, man will be lost, as dead as the moa. In 1800, te reo Maori was the only language spoken in New Zealand. By 1899, it was on the verge of disappearing altogether. In Ka Ngaro Te Reo, Paul Moon traces the spiralling decline of the language during an era of prolonged colonization that saw political, economic, cultural and linguistic power shifting steadily into the hands of the European core.

Dr Paul Moon is Professor of History at Auckland University of Technology, where his research focuses on nineteenth-century New Zealand. In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at University College, London, and he was also recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.