Fijian

Why missionaries picked the Bau dialect

The first settlers brought the language to Fiji about 3,500 years ago, and for millennia it was the only language spoken there. Methodist missionaries from Australia began work on a written form in 1835 and had a writing system by 1840. They chose Bauan, an East Fijian dialect, for print, partly for its prestige and partly because Bau was then the politically dominant island.

Bauan spread west through the churches into Viti Levu, where people spoke West Fijian, a separate language grouped with Polynesian and Rotuman. The British administration later adopted it for dealing with the iTaukei, and over time it became Standard Fijian, which took in English and words from other dialects and drifted away from the original Bauan.

Does Fijian share words with Polynesian languages

Many, though mostly as cognates. Fijian and the Polynesian languages sit in the same Central Pacific branch of Austronesian and descend from a common ancestor, though some words did come in later from Tonga, especially in the eastern dialects.

What the letters stand for

The alphabet is Latin and close to one letter per sound. The digraph dr is a postalveolar sound close to a prenasalised trill. Before i, the letters t and d are pronounced as ch and j sounds, which is how Viti, the Fijian name for the islands, became Fiji in English. Vowel length goes unmarked except in dictionaries and textbooks, which use a macron. Dictionary compilers in the 1980s added z and h for words entering from English and from other dialects.

How its official status was settled

Fiji had no official language before the 1997 constitution made Fijian co-official with English and Hindustani. Fijian was still not a compulsory school subject, and in 2005 educators and chiefs campaigned to change that. Since 2013 the constitution has named it a national language beside English and Hindi. After independence in 1970 it moved onto radio and television, into books and periodicals, and into the classroom.