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 |
| Latin-based | |
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
 Tonga
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | to |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | tong1325 |
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:
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