Tikopia language
| Tikopia | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Solomon Islands |
| Region | Tikopia Island. |
|
Native speakers
|
3,300 (1999) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | tiko1237 |
The Tikopia language is a Polynesian Outlier language from the island of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands. It is closely related to the Anuta language of the neighboring island of Anuta. Tikopian is also spoken by the Polynesian minority on Vanikoro, who long ago migrated from Tikopia.
Because of its remote and isolated location, Tikopia had few contacts with outside groups until well into the twentieth century. Tikopians occasionally visited other islands, but these trips were limited by the large distances and great hazards involved in canoe ocean voyages. Contacts by Westerners began sporadically around the beginning of the nineteenth century, but in 1927, when Firth did his initial fieldwork in Tikopia, the indigenous culture was largely intact. The major contact agents were, first, missionaries and, later, labor recruiters. By the 1950s, all the Tikopians had become Christianized, and most of the native ritual practices had ceased. Much of the Tikopian life style has remained intact, but the forces of Westernization have been making inroads throughout the twentieth century (Lagace, 1974).
Tikopia is a small remote volcanic island that has a population of 1,200 people. It is the southwest of the Solomon Islands. There are about seventy-five different languages that are spoken on the Solomon Islands. Out of these languages seventy-one are living and four are extinct. Out of the living languages five are institutional, twenty-four are developing, twenty-six are vigorous, eight are in trouble, and eight are dying. Linguists refer this language as a Samoic or a Polynesian Outlier language. Polynesian Outlier languages are a number of Polynesian societies that lie outside the main region of the Polynesian Triangle. Some linguists also believe that Tikopia and Anuta are the dialects of the same language. There are approximately 3320 speakers that speak the Tikopian language. The Tikopian language, Tikopia-Anuta, is part of the Austronesian language family (Firth, 1985).
There are twelve consonant phonemes that this language uses. They use the letters /f, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, ng/ and the glottal stop (Firth, 1985). There have been debates from different linguists on whether or not Tikopia uses l or r. Elbert claims that Tikopia is a language that uses l but not r and he strongly believes this because he believed Tikopia was a colony of Samoa. Raymond Firth said, “Dumont DʻUrville published a small dictionary in 1834 where 235 words were collected.” R was the most dominant in that dictionary because it appeared in 50 words while l appeared in only 15. The language changed in over a century and modernly more words are used with l. Raymond Firths own work shows that both l and r phonemes are used. Not too many words use the letter l and are actually rarely heard in native speakers (Firth, 1963).
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