Tongan Language - Tongan Alphabet

Tongan Alphabet

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:

Notes:

1. written as g but still pronounced as (as in Samoan) before 1943
2. unaspirated; written as b before 1943
3. sometimes written as j before 1943 (see below)
4. the glottal stop. It should be written with the inverted curly apostrophe (unicode 0x02BB) and not with the single quote open or with a mixture of quotes open and quotes close. See also ʻokina.

Note that the above order is strictly followed in proper dictionaries. Therefore ngatu follows nusi, ʻa follows vunga and it also follows z if foreign words occur. Words with long vowels come directly after those with short vowels. Improper wordlists may or may not follow these rules. (For example, the Tonga telephone directory for years now ignores all rules.)

The original j, used for /tʃ/, disappeared in the beginning of the 20th century, merging with /s/. By 1943, j was no longer used. Consequently, many words written with s in Tongan are cognate to those with t in other Polynesian languages. For example, Masisi (a star name) in Tongan is cognate with Matiti in Tokelauan; siale (Gardenia taitensis) in Tongan and tiare in Tahitian. This seems to be a natural development, as /tʃ/ in many Polynesian languages derived from Proto-Polynesian /ti/.