Te Reo Māori Web Map
See if you can spot the Te Reo names of your town, notable mountain peaks, lakes, marae locations, rivers, suburbs, bays and international cities and countries.
Please do not embed this map in other websites without permission. Cheers!
Further Resources
There is a great deal of history, cultural significance and stories behind many Māori place names. The Ngāi Tahu Atlas provides a well researched and incredible depth of knowledge and history for names in the South Island.
About this map
Not content to settle with just a print Te Reo map, I took a shot at creating an interactive, scrollable map of Te Reo Māori place names using Mapbox Studio. To do this, I worked to add as many Te Reo places as I could find to OpenStreetMap (OSM), the open source street map database. There, I tagged as many Māori names as alternate language names as I could find, which ended up being way more than I expected! It took a lot of time and a few months of work on and off to get to the immense level of detail you see on the map below. I hope you enjoy it!
The map is a work in progress. If you see something that could be fixed or added, let me know! Alternatively, you can contribute yourself by adding the location in OpenStreetMap.
Map Sources
Sources that were used during the research of this map included:
- Maorilanguage.net
- Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)
- New Zealand Geographic Board (NZGB)
- Te Ara Encyclopedia
- NZhistory.govt.nz
- Ngāi Tahu Atlas
- The Reed Dictionary of Maori Place Names by A.W. Reed
- The Rāupo Dictionary of Modern Maori
- Maori Dictionary
© Map Andrew Douglas-Clifford
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, Natural Earth. Marae locations by TPK.
Download Dataset
Want to make your own maps using Te Reo names? My Open Data page hosts shapefile extracts of Te Reo names from the OpenStreetMap database.
Map last updated from OSM: 8th September 2019