In Porirua, the older students teach the little ones a song about their own town

At Te Rauparaha Arena, hundreds of tamariki watched a flag rise over Pātaka while teenagers from Aotea College led them through a waiata written for their harbour city. The song, Nau piki mai ki Porirua, was the opening of a week in which a language of 213,849 everyday speakers was meant to be heard in libraries, markets and parks.

Porirua City Council called the moment very special, which is the plainest possible description and probably the right one. The city had signed on to Te Reo Towns, the community theme of this year's Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, running under the words Ake, Ake, Ake — A Forever Language. Led nationally by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori and Te Mātāwai, the idea asks towns to stop treating the language as ceremonial and let it into the ordinary places where people already are.

Porirua took that literally. Kindy Gym sessions ran bilingual. The City Centre Library staged a special edition of Story World. There were waiata sessions for infants and the adults holding them, a poi-making workshop, an exhibition talk at Pātaka, and on Friday a Pacific Night Market given a te reo theme — a decision that makes sense in a city where 26.5 percent of residents are Pacific peoples, the highest share outside Auckland. Porirua College's Te Rōpū Kapa Haka performed through the week. Mayor Anita Baker, curator and cultural advisor Te Rauparaha Horomona, and community figures Jarom Hippolite and Taku Parai moved through the programme.

That last figure is the quiet problem underneath the week. The number of speakers is climbing; the proportion of Māori who speak the language has barely moved in ten years. Growth is coming from elsewhere — from schools, from towns like this one, from teenagers teaching children.

The arena itself carries the name of Te Rauparaha, the chief who led Ngāti Toa south from Kāwhia in the 1820s; the iwi's marae, Takapūwāhia, sits a short walk away on the western side of the harbour. And the week exists because in September 1972 a petition with roughly 30,000 signatures was carried to Parliament by Ngā Tamatoa, the Te Reo Māori Society and the Māori Students' Association, asking that schools with large Māori rolls teach the language. It took until 1987 for te reo Māori to become official.

Fifty-four years after that walk to Parliament, the request has been answered in a way the petitioners could not have scripted: not by a ministry, but by students from Aotea College standing in front of a crowd of infants, teaching them a song about the place they all come from.