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Many countries already employ bilingual or even multilingual road signs including Wales, Ireland, Finland and Switzerland.

Bilingual road signs in Aotearoa New Zealand would tell us where we are as a nation

Road signs help us to get where we are and to where we’re going, that much is obvious. But, at another level, road signs show us where we are and where we’re heading as a people and a culture. So the language of Aotearoa New Zealand’s road signs is important — not least because they are also expressions of the exercise of state power in our everyday lives. The size, shape and text of road signs are all governed by law. Despite te reo Māori’s status as an official language in New Zealand there is no legal requirement for signs to be in any language other than English. But that coul...