Futunan

How Futunan lost ground to French

King Sigave signed a treaty establishing a French protectorate on 16 February 1888, under pressure from missionaries. France annexed the kingdoms of Wallis, Futuna and Alofi as colonies in 1917, and in 1961 their citizens voted to become a French overseas territory. Futunan stayed fairly sheltered through all of this. Around the Second World War the number of speakers began to fall sharply, driven above all by emigration to New Caledonia, and French became the main language of the grade schools.

Futunans still use their language every day and keep French mainly for school and for dealing with Europeans. RFO radio airs 15 minutes of news in Futunan daily. At the 2018 census 27.9% of the territory's people aged 14 and over spoke Futunan most at home, against 29.9% in 2008; on Futuna itself the figure was 94.5%.

Why Futunans spell differently from the textbooks

Isidore Grétzel devised the first orthography, marking long vowels with a superscript dash and the glottal stop with an apostrophe; Claire Moyse-Faurie later replaced the dash with a macron. The velar nasal is written g, so Futunan tagata, man, stands where Tongan writes tangata. In daily writing the macron is usually dropped or swapped for a circumflex, because both are hard to type on an AZERTY keyboard, and mālō le maʻuli, good morning, becomes malo le mauli. Official spelling separates ko le and i le, and most people write kole and ile.

Which Polynesian languages are its kin

Futunan is closely related to Fagauvea, Wallisian, Tongan, Samoan, Tokelau and Niuafoʻou. It has five vowels, each short or long, and eleven consonants, and every syllable ends in a vowel.