Tokelauan language

Tokelauan
Native to Tokelau, Swains Island (American Samoa, United States)
Native speakers
 (1,400 in Tokelau cited 1987)[1]
17 in Swains Island, 2,100 elsewhere, mostly New Zealand (no date)[1]
Official status
Official language in
  Tokelau
Language codes
ISO 639-2 tkl
ISO 639-3 tkl
Glottolog toke1240[2]

Tokelauan /toʊkəˈlaʊən/[3] is a Polynesian language spoken in Tokelau and in the American Samoan island of Swains Island which is in turn part of the United States. It is closely related to Samoan language and distantly related to Tuvaluan language and other Polynesian languages. Tokelauan has a co-official status in Tokelau along with English. There are a total of 4,000 speakers of Tokelauan, of whom 2,100 live in New Zealand, 1,400 in Tokelau, and 17 in Swains Island.

Speakers

It is spoken by about 1,500 people on the atolls of Tokelau, and by the few inhabitants of Swains Island in neighbouring American Samoa. It is a member of the Samoic family of Polynesian languages. It is, alongside English, the official language of Tokelau. In addition to the population of Tokelau, it is spoken by approximately 2,900 Tokelauan expatriates in New Zealand. Its ISO 639-3 code is tkl.

Affinities with other languages

Tokelauan is mutually intelligible with the Tuvaluan language. Samoan literature is recognised mostly due to the early unwelcome introduction of Christian Samoan missionaries to which the Samoan language was forcibly held as the language of instruction at school and at church. It also has marked similarities to the Niuafo'ou language of Tonga.

Tokelauan is written in the Latin script, albeit only using 15 letters:

A, E, I, O, U, F, G, K, L, M, N, P, H, T, and V.

Its alphabet consists of 5 vowels:

a (pronounced: /a/), e (pronounced: /e/), i (pronounced: /i/), o (pronounced: /o/) and u (pronounced: /u/);

and 10 consonants:

f, ŋ (spelled as "g"), k, l, m, n, p, h, t, v.

Loimata Iupati, Tokelau's resident Director of Education, has stated that he is in the process of translating the Bible from English into Tokelauan.

Phrases

TokelauanEnglish
Fanatu au là?Shall I come too?
Ko toku nena e i Nukunonu.My grandmother lives in Nukunonu.
Malo ni, ea mai koe?Hello, how are you?
E hēai ni vakalele i Tokelau. There are no airplanes in Tokelau.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Tokelauan at Ethnologue (15th ed., 2005)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Tokelau". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ↑ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook, Edinburgh

External links

Tokelauan language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/30/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.