Tahitian language

Tahitian (autonym Reo Tahiti, part of Reo Mā'ohi, languages of French Polynesia) is a Polynesian language, spoken mainly in the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It belongs to the Eastern Polynesian group.

Tahitian was first transcribed from the oral spoken language into writing by missionaries of the London Missionary Society in the early 19th century.

Tahitian is the most prominent of the indigenous Polynesian languages spoken in French Polynesia (reo mā’ohi). The latter also include:

When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti at the end of the 18th century, there was no writing system and Tahitian was only a spoken language. In 1797, Protestant missionaries arrived in Tahiti on a British ship called Duff, captained by James Wilson. Among the missionaries was Henry Nott (1774–1844) who learned the Tahitian language and worked with Pōmare II, a Tahitian king, to translate the English Bible into Tahitian. A system of 5 vowels and 9 consonants was adopted for the Tahitian Bible which would become the key text by which many Polynesians would learn to read and write.

Tahitian features a very small number of phonemes: five vowels and nine consonants, not counting the lengthened vowels and diphthongs. Notably, the consonant inventory lacks any sort of dorsal consonants.

Next follows a table with all phonemes in more detail.

The glottal stop or 'eta is a genuine consonant. This is typical of Polynesian languages (compare to the Hawaiian ʻokina and others). Glottal stops used to be seldom written in practice, but are now commonly written, though often as straight apostrophes, ' , instead of the curly apostrophes used in Hawaiian. Alphabetical word ordering in dictionaries used to ignore the existence of glottals. However, academics and scholars now publish text content with due use of glottal stops.