Tongan

Where it’s spoken

Tongan (lea faka-Tonga) is the official language of the Kingdom of Tonga, alongside English. Significant Tongan-speaking communities live in New Zealand (about 60,000 speakers), Australia, the United States (especially Utah and Hawaii), and to a lesser extent in Fiji and elsewhere in the Pacific. About 187,000 people speak it as a first language.

What it sounds like

Tongan has twelve consonants and five vowels with phonemic length. Glottal stops (fakauʻa) are phonemic and written with an apostrophe-like ʻokina. The language uses an absolutive-ergative case system, marking subjects of intransitive verbs with the same particle as objects of transitive verbs — unusual in Polynesian.

How it’s written

Tongan uses 16 Latin letters: a, e, i, o, u, f, h, k, l, m, n, ng, p, s, t, v, plus the ʻokina and the kahakō (macron) for vowel length. Missionary linguists developed the orthography in the early 19th century.

History

Tongan was the language of the Tu’i Tonga Empire (10th–15th centuries), which extended its influence across much of western Polynesia. Tonga’s status as the only Pacific kingdom to never be formally colonized has helped preserve the language’s place in public and royal life.