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Almost half of Maori people now live with non-Maori partners - a degree of intermarriage that far surpasses rates in all other ethnic groups.
An analysis of Census figures by Auckland University researcher Lyndon Walker shows the proportion of Maori men partnering non-Maori women has increased from 35.6 per cent in 1981 to 49.8 per cent last year.
The trend for Maori women is almost as strong. Their proportion partnering non-Maori men has risen from 37.6 per cent to 45.3 per cent in the same period.
In contrast, intermarriage has declined in the Asian community as the size of the Asian population has swollen; and it has been stable in the Pacific community.
There has been a slight long-term increase in intermarriage by Europeans, but their sheer numbers mean that almost 90 per cent of male and female Europeans are still choosing European partners.
The data, presented at an Australasian sociology conference in Auckland yesterday, also suggests that the strong increase in intermarriage by Maori people in the period of Maori urbanisation up to 1996 may have levelled off in the past decade.
Mr Walker said the 1996 figures, when the proportion of Maori women partnering with non-Maori men peaked at 47 per cent, might have been affected by a change in the ethnicity question in that year's Census which encouraged people to claim more than one ethnicity. It is also possible that swelling Maori political and cultural assertiveness in the past decade has encouraged Maori to seek out Maori partners.
Alternatively, Maori may simply be benefiting from increased numbers in the same way as the Asian community, giving them more people of the same ethnicity to choose from.
The figures are complicated by the fact that 10 per cent of everyone who answered last year's Census, and 47 per cent of all Maori, listed more than one ethnicity on their forms.
Mr Walker's figures show that the proportion of men who listed their only ethnicity as European (or "New Zealander") who lived with a partner who was not European-only roughly doubled from 5.5 per cent in 1981 to 10.7 per cent last year.
The proportion of European-only women with non-European-only partners rose from 4.7 per cent to 10.5 per cent.
The proportion of Pacific-only men and women living with partners from other ethnic groups was stable at between 23 and 28 per cent.
In the Asian community, about 20 per cent of men and women lived with non-Asian partners 25 years ago, when most families of Asian ethnicity had been in this country for generations.
With a big jump in Asian immigration, Asian men have become less likely to live with non-Asian women (now only 7 per cent), while the proportion of Asian women living with non-Asian men jumped to 28 per cent in 1986 before returning to its starting point of 20 per cent by last year.
Maori researcher Andrew Sporle said the number of people claiming Maori ethnicity had jumped in the past decade because of "what we call the Shortland Street or Dr Ropata effect".
"It suddenly became really cool to be Maori."
