Tongan

About Tongan

Tongan is the language of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific, where it is an official language together with English. About 186,000 people speak it, in Tonga and in Tongan communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It is a Polynesian language, related to Samoan, Maori and Hawaiian.

Tongan is written much as it is pronounced. An apostrophe-like mark stands for a short catch in the throat and counts as a consonant, and a line over a vowel makes it long. The everyday greeting is mālō e lelei, and mālō on its own means thank you. Tongan has separate words used when speaking to or about the king and the nobles, so some words in formal speech differ from everyday ones.

FamilyAustronesian, Polynesian
Speakersabout 186,000 (2015)
Official inTonga
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codesto (ISO 639-1), ton (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Ethnologue (2015), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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