New Zealand's government says it will provide more support for Pacific language projects.
This week, the Ministry for Pacific Peoples introduced round two of its Community Languages Fund (CLF) for grassroots community and family language projects.
Minister Aupito William Sio said the second funding tier of $NZ10,000 was in addition to the existing $NZ2,500 tier.
Aupito said during the first round, which closed on 31 July, applicants were able to apply for up to $2,500 to support language projects in their homes and communities.
He said 143 applications were received over the past eight weeks.
Aupito said this followed the recent Languages Innovation Fund pilot programme for community funding.
He said based on feedback from community groups, the main reason for the CLF's popularity was the simple and straightforward application process.
"Another contributing factor was the on-going engagements with the community, which provided a bit more clarity on what was expected when applying for the fund," he said.
"Groups were able to apply for funding to support events being run through the Pacific Language Weeks.
"We noticed while there was an influx of applications from the larger cities, there was a growing number of smaller groups in the regions applying for funds to support their language week initiatives."
Aupito said these trends highlighted the need to support the growth of community initiatives both now and with their long-term planning and development of language programmes.
"When the Languages Unit assessed applications for round one, it was evident some of the projects would cost more than $2,500, specifically projects that create language resources such as app development, books, and digital resources."
Round two of the CLF will close on 28 October.