Tongan

Last Updated: 2020-07-02

Background

Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Central-Eastern / Eastern Malayo-Polynesian / Oceanic / Central-Eastern Oceanic / Remote Oceanic / Central Pacific / East Fijian-Polynesian / Polynesian / Tongic

• Tongan is spoken throughout the Kindgdom of Tonga, a sovereign state northeast of New Zealand comprised of over one hundred islands.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p	t	k	ʔ
Affricates
Fricatives	f v	s		h
Nasals	m	n	ŋ
Approximants		l
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Vowel length is phonemic in Tongan (Anderson and Otsuka 2006, 27). Long vowels are indicated by a macron (¯).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

• An acute accent is also used in the orthography to indicate stress (Anderson and Otsuka 2006, 23), but given that we don’t account for stress, all accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain representations.
• The grapheme indicating the glottal stop is called a fakauʻa - it is not a standard apostrophe (Schutz and Tuinukuafe 1994, 267).

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
e	/e/
f	/f/
h	/h/
i	/i/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/v/
ʻ	/ʔ/
Digraph
ng	/ŋ/

Misc. Rules

• Tongan has a rare three-way laryngeal contrast between /ʔ/, /h/, and vowels in initial positions (Garellek and Tabain 2019, 3).
• /t/ regularly changes to /s/ preceding /i/ (Morton 1962 as cited in Garellek and Tabain (2019), p. 2).

References

Anderson, Victoria, and Yuko Otsuka. 2006. “The Phonetics and Phonology of ‘Definitive Accent’ in Tongan.” Oceanic Linguistics 45 (1).

Garellek, Marc, and Marija Tabain. 2019. “Tongan.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association, March. Cambridge University Press (CUP), 1–11. doi:10.1017/s0025100318000397.

Morton, Ermel Joseph. 1962. “A Descriptive Grammar of Tongan.” PhD thesis, Ann Arbor: Indiana University; UMI.

Schutz, Albert J., and Edgar Tuinukuafe. 1994. “A Simplified Dictionary of Modern Tongan.” Oceanic Linguistics 33 (1). JSTOR: 262. doi:10.2307/3623008.