Tokelauan language

Tokelauan
Native to Tokelau
Native speakers
 unknown (1,400 in Tokelau cited 1987)[1]
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 closely related to Tuvaluan.

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. The language is currently being taught privately, and in a few schools, in Brentwood, Essex, UK. Its ISO 639-3 code is tkl.

Affinities with other languages

Tokelauan is mutually intelligible with Tuvaluan, the main language of the neighbouring island realm of Tuvalu, and uses Samoan literature. 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. This 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, 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. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Tokelau". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook, Edinburgh

External links

Tokelauan language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator


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