September 02, 2019
Parr charts course for million tweets
The Māori broadcast funding agency is encouraging people to use Māori Language Week as an opportunity to use te reo Māori on Twitter – with the aim of breaking one million reo tweets.
Te Māngai Pāho chief executive Larry Parr says according to Indigenous Tweets, a tool developed by a supporter of the Gaelic language revival, there are now just under 4000 Māori language users on Twitter, up from 600 this time last year.
There have been about 280,000 te reo tweets, so one million seemed a goal worth setting.
"The attraction of encouraging people to use social media is it is an active use of te reo, as opposed to say sitting and watching a television programme which is more passive, so you actually have to use the reo," Mr Parr says.
If the million mark is met Māori will be in the top 10 indigenous languages on Twitter.
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