An Aotearoa cafe in Wellington has offered customers a discount by ordering in te reo Māori language.

The 10 per cent discount applies to all items on the Karaka Caf menu during Te Wiki o te reo Māori program.

The government-sponsored initiative is intended to encourage New Zealanders to promote its use of the dialogue in Māori Language Week.

Te Wiki o te reo Māori is part the New Zealand government's broader movement since the Māori Language Act 1987 was passed to revive the Indigenous tongue, one of the country's two official national languages alongside English.

The move at the popular cafe on the capital city's ritzy waterfront has also earned the ire of a number of Pākehā (non-Maori) people online when first reported in Aotearoa.

Running the story days earlier, The New Zealand Herald was forced to turn the comments section off its Facebook post after many online readers made derogatory and racist comments about being asked to speak Māori.

A sign has been placed inside of the café to inform customers to recite the phrase, 'TēnÄ koa poroa te tekau paihēneti o te utu' to ask to trim 10 per cent off the price.

Café owners Paul and Keri Ritemanu wanted to deliver discounts to create awareness for non-Māori speakers of how te reo speakers have to constantly leave their own "language bubble" outside of a tight knit Māori-speaking community.

Last year's figures from the New Zealand Education Department suggest 28.5 per cent of nearly 237,000 students were involved in te reo language, which 33.2 per cent identified as Maori.

The married couple and their seven children have whakapapa genealogy links to the NgÄ puhi and Tuwharetoa Māori tribes in addition to having Samoan ancestry.

Cafe manager Cam Cuff said this was the first year the cafe ran the promotion for Te Wiki o te reo Māori, but it has been trying to promote te reo to customers and staff before.

"We've had a lot of customers come in and give it a go, and it's been really interesting," Cuff told the media to promote Te Wiki o te reo Māori.

"We've had all kinds of people give it a go: we've had foreigners, we've had tourists, we've had people who only speak a little bit of English give it a go.

"I would say for this week 70 per cent of our customers have wanted to give it a go."

Mr Cuff said no one has tried asking for a rima tekau paihēneti (50 per cent) discount for Te Wiki o te reo Māori, which is something of a custom of the celebrated event when activists for a Māori Protest Group marched to the parliament and placed a suitcase on its steps in 1972.

Inside the suitcase was a petition with 30,000 signatures, which famously became known as te Petihana Reo Māori to advocate for te reo to be recognised.

After several changes of government since the activists march, the Māori Language Act was finally passed that gave te reo equal official status with English.

"No one has yet tried to pull us on that one," Mr Cuff said.

But there has been other attempts to get around the discounted offer easier.

"There's been groups that will put forward their Māori person to come and offer for the group, but we are very strict on saying if everyone wants to get (the discount), everyone has got to give it a go."

In Aotearoa, just four per cent of Kiwis can hold a conversation in te reo Māori

Only one in every five Māori people from almost 1 million of Māori descent can speak the language, despite 19.6 per cent of the nation's population having Māori heritage.

Despite there being more than 150 Māori iwi (tribes) and sub-iwi groups, including the Moriori iwi of the Chatham Islands, they all speak the same common te reo Māori language.

In comparison, there are more than 150 different Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages spoken in Australia.

The Karaka Cafe is looking to use their own campaign to push for the use of te reo in store, with staff embracing the language and pushing customers to increase their use of te reo.

Staff greet customers with kia ora and mÅ ena rather than hello and good morning with the cafe's menus also bilingual.

"Even outside te Wiki o te reo Māori, people are also ordering the Māori option off the menu before even ordering the English," Mr Cuff said.