Tongan language

Tongan
lea faka-Tonga
Native to	Tonga; significant immigrant community in New Zealand and the United States
Native speakers	96,000 in Tonga (1998) 73,000 elsewhere (no date), primarily in NZ, US, and Australia
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Polynesian Tongic Tongan
Writing system	Latin-based
Official status
Official language in	Tonga
Language codes
ISO 639-1	to
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	tong1325
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Tongan /ˈtɒŋən/ (lea fakatonga) is an Austronesian language of the Polynesian branch spoken in Tonga. It has around 200,000 speakers and is a national language of Tonga. It is a VSO (verb–subject–object) language.

Tongan is one of the multiple languages in the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages, along with Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan and Tahitian, for example. Together with Niuean, it forms the Tongic subgroup of Polynesian.

Tongan is unusual among Polynesian languages in that it has a so-called definitive accent. As with all Polynesian languages, Tongan has adapted the phonological system of proto-Polynesian.

Tongan is written in a subset of the Latin script. In the old, "missionary" alphabet, the order of the letters was modified: the vowels were put first and then followed by the consonants: a, e, i, o, u, f, etc. This was still so as of the Privy Council decision of 1943 on the orthography of the Tongan language. However, C.M. Churchward's grammar and dictionary favoured the standard European alphabetical order, and since his time that one has been in use exclusively: