Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

Twitter is buzzing with Māori words and tweets about Māori Language Week/Te Wiki o te reo Māori.

Below are my initial observations, after reading several hundred tweets this morning. Other ad hoc commentary this week will be via my Twitter account @ktaiuru

• The hashtags for those that are using them, appear to be as follows: #maori , #wikireo and #reo . Some people are using all three, while others are using none at all.
• It should be noted that Twitter does not appear to support Unicode in the hashtags hence the lack of the macron.
• Most people are spelling Māori without a macron
• Tweets are ranging from free te reo resources such as games, words all New Zealanders should know, to, commercial tweets enticing people to purchase items, some of which have no relevance at all to Māori Language Week, politics and how to involve more Māori participation
• A lot of tweets have macrons in the sentences, but not in the word Māori. I assume this is so that the tweet appears in peoples searches for the word “Maori”
• No one seems to be abbreviating their Māori words.