Pacific migrants must prove their English to enter New Zealand, then receive little support to sustain the languages they bring with them. With climate change accelerating the displacement of Pacifika communities to countries like New Zealand, their languages, cultures and critical ecological knowledge could also be washed away by rising sea levels.
The English Language Act 2026 officially assented by New Zealand’s governing coalition on August 6 2026 enshrining English as a second official language, has renewed public debate surrounding Te Reo Māori and minority languages. Despite 96% of the population speaking English fluently, the successful revival of Māori from colonisation-driven extinction has long stirred tensions within political factions that view Māori centrality as an existential threat.
The real languages at risk, however, are sinking just as fast as their home nations.
As of 2023, pan-ethnic Pasifika diaspora comprise 8% of New Zealand’s population, yet remain marginalised within the bicultural Māori–Pākehā framework that shapes national policy. As climate change increasingly displaces low-lying Pacific communities to New Zealand, preserving their languages is not merely an empty legislative gesture like the English Language Act, but integral to their cultural survival.
Under its 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, New Zealand has positioned itself as a key steward of the Pacific region. And as a leading member of the Blue Pacific, the onus is on New Zealand to rework resettlement frameworks, cultural support networks and language policy to safeguard increasingly vulnerable Pasifika identities.
Cultural Identity vs. Colonial Legacy
“Wouldn’t it be easier if we all spoke the same language?” is a common refrain thrown around in functionally monolingual societies such as New Zealand. But this embedded support for monolingualism is more than an unintended consequence of the settler-colonialist dispossession imposed upon these nations; rather it is an integral part of the lingering colonial model. English monolingualism is often perceived as ‘efficient’ or ‘productive’ within systems that draw on exploitation or extraction, yet as it continues to erode cultural and linguistic diversity it ironically falls increasingly short in a globalised world moving toward divergent thinking, sustainability and multiculturalism.
The importance of multilingualism is thus inherent in how language shapes identity, transmits intergenerational knowledge and determines cultural survival. Pacific languages have a long oral history, encoding centuries of ecological knowledge for responsible environmental management and social norms. Without targeted support, heritage transmission of over 1200 Pacific languages and their associated benefits is at risk of extinction in growing diaspora groups.
New Zealand’s Pacific Languages Strategy 2022 was the first of its kind to address declining Pacific language fluency, funding language education and resources for nine languages. Funding, however, was unevenly delegated based on the total number of language speakers residing in New Zealand, neglecting smaller and endangered language groups. Such an overarching strategy has also failed to protect pre-existing Pacific bilingual language programs, whose funding was halved in the 2023-2024 budget.
These measures compared to the state-backed kohanga reo immersion schools and legal recognition of Māori are part of a broader attitude towards treating Pacific languages as ‘heritage’ rather than central to Pasifika identities. Since the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi established power-sharing between the Māori and the British Crown, the Pasifika diaspora has consistently operated as peripheral to a bicultural colonial governance model ill-equipped to accommodate New Zealand’s increasingly multicultural and multilingual society.
No Time to Waste
The global climate migration crisis is intensifying, yet major powers and destination hubs, such as New Zealand, consistently fail to bridge their rhetorics on climate with the realities facing nations who are most at-risk in this crisis. In fact, these communities are oftentimes completely left out of discussions surrounding meaningful climate action. Despite record turnout of Indigenous communities and Pacific leaders at the COP30 forum in Brazil, they remained excluded from key climate finance discourses and saw their campaign for total phaseout of fossil fuels largely unanswered. New Zealand entered into the forum having submitted only a 5% increase in their emission reductions target to 51-55% by 2035, which alongside multiple recent policies to allow greater oil, gas and petroleum resource exploration, signals the Coalition government’s damaging lack of climate ambition.
For current Pacific migrants, the connection between climate inaction, marginalisation, and migration pathways is nothing new. New Zealand has long offered small permanent migration options such as the 1970 Samoan Quota (SQ) and 2002 Pacific Access Category (PAC) visa schemes for Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati and Tuvalu which delegate 1100 and 650 annual spots respectively on a lottery framework. As forms of labour-based migration that require applicants meet English, health and character requirements while holding valid job-offers, the PAC and SQ bear similar structural discriminatory flaws to the Pacific Languages Strategy. Originally created to strengthen ties between New Zealand and its Pacific neighbours, these schemes have similarly failed to integrate the growing realities of climate change into their design; further straining relations for Pasifika diaspora.
These pathways are far from neutral policies, effectively becoming tools of colonial control that gatekeep mobility and increasingly serve geopolitical interests. Migration pathways are not formed from and granted to those in direct need, but rather delegated selectively based on skill shortages, and stage host nations as benevolent benefactors in donor-recipient framings that only reproduce colonial hierarchies. Applicants must demonstrate English proficiency to enter New Zealand, yet once arrived, receive no structural support to sustain their own languages. Cultural security, which indelibly requires the protection of language and linguistic expression, remains entirely absent from existing frameworks that purport to sponsor, uplift and protect the Pasifika diaspora’s identity.
Achieving a Multilingual Pacific Future
As the English Language Act continues to face significant opposition, it detracts public attention and policymaking away from the urgency of filling this gap in Pacific languages protection.
The Pacific Languages Strategy firstly requires significant reformation to equitably address the most vulnerable climate migrant language groups. Under the framework developed by UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages, language endangerment should be assessed based on the combination of its six major evaluative factors including intergenerational language transmission, absolute number of speakers and proportion of speakers within the total population. New Zealand’s current funding formula solely predicated on a per-speaker population logic directly contradicts these international standards.
Pasifika diaspora should seek to foster replication of Māori kohanga reo and community-first, grassroots initiatives for Pacific languages. Despite a complete lack of government funding and support until the Waitangi Tribunal Te Reo claim of 1984, the number of Te Kohanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori immersion language nests run by community elders teaching directly to young Māori outstripped the number of kindergartens nationwide by 1993.
Instead of relying solely on top-down policy initiatives, the kohanga reo movement demonstrated community-driven infrastructure precedes and is more durable in delivering results for under-serviced communities. Studies have moreover proven that Māori students in Māori educational institutions performed significantly better in final year exams, while reporting higher wellbeing and a deeper connection to their cultural identity.
The current PAC and SQ visa schemes detrimentally predicate the rights of climate-displaced communities upon their productive capacity rather than climate necessity. These visa frameworks must be equitably reformed to offer specific pathways for climate mobility, and simultaneously seek to embed funded community language programming and cultural liaison measures within the conditions for migration.
With the COP31 forum in Türkiye looming, and pre-COP meetings being held in Vanuatu and Fiji, there is an opportunity for New Zealand to learn from its past missteps, advocate for the growing Pasifika diaspora and develop a holistic, culturally sensitive framework for all to understand.
Jemma Tan is an Honours student majoring in Finance and Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney, with an interest in how nurturing international ties can capitalise on the advantages of Australia’s multicultural society.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
