Tongan Language - Registers

Registers

There are three registers which consist of

• ordinary words (the normal language)
• honorific words (the language for the chiefs)
• regal words (the language for the king)

There are also further distinctions between

• polite words (used for more formal contexts)
• derogatory words (used for informal contexts, or to indicate humility)

For example, the phrase "Come and eat!" translates to:

• ordinary: haʻu 'o kai (come and eat!); Friends, family members and so forth may say this to each other when invited for dinner.
• honorific: meʻa mai pea ʻilo (come and eat!); The proper used towards chiefs, particularly the nobles, but it may also be used by an employee towards his boss, or in other similar situations. When talking about chiefs, however, it is always used, even if they are not actually present, but in other situations only on formal occasions. A complication to the beginning student of Tongan is that such words very often also have an alternative meaning in the ordinary register: meʻa (thing) and ʻilo (know, find).
• regal: hāʻele mai pea taumafa (come and eat!); Used towards the king or God. The same considerations as for the honorific register apply. Hāʻele is one of the regal words which have become the normal word in other Polynesian. Opeti Taliai of the Tongan History Association explained that the regal vocabulary was ostensibly of Samoan origin . History tells that sometimes the Tongans really went to Sāmoa to invent a new regal word. The Sāmoans, instead gave them words with vulgar meanings in their language, and the Tongans, not knowing that, used them to their king. Example 1: māimoa = labour of the king, either physical or mental (like the poems of Queen Sālote) from the Sāmoan maʻimoa = chicken illness, meaning: insane. Example 2: lakoifie = good health of the king, probably from the Fijian lako-i-vē = walk to where?

Use of polite and derogatory words can be illustrated as follows:

• polite: meʻatokoni (food, or more precisely: meʻa-tokoni: food-thing, i.e. foodstuff); This would be used in serious study books or in more formal situations, rather than the ordinary meʻakai.
• derogatory: mama (eat!); Words which normally would be used for the pigs. The word mama means "to chew" (along with various other meanings) in the ordinary register. A speaker would apply this word to himself and the commoners to emphasise the distance between him and the nobles or the king.