"In 2023, a University of Canterbury study found that even non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders could, on average, subconsciously recognise over 1000 words of Te Reo Māori."
#SimonWilson, 2026
https://simonwilsonhopetown.substack.com/p/dirty-work-and-the-disinfecting-sunshine
That sounds super cool! But if this is the study Wilson was thinking of;
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-mori-words-understood-zealand.html
... it also says most of those people only understand the meanings of about 70 of those words, which is not so cool.
@strypey
This is all subject to my not great memory recall, but I consider myself a non-Māori speaker but had too much reo to participate in the study. The really were going for people who are not familiar with the language, and yet people could still somehow identify genuine Māori words from made up not words in Māori form. Which is pretty interesting linguistically, even if it is sad that there's still so many of us here who are monolingual.