Niuean

Why Niuean has more speakers abroad

Of around 8,000 speakers counted in 1991, only 1,600 lived on the island. The rest were in the Cook Islands, Tonga and above all New Zealand, which held 70% of all speakers in the early 1990s. Most people on Niue are bilingual in English.

What separates Motu from Tafiti

The island has two main dialects: the older Motu of the north, whose name means the people of the island, and Tafiti in the south, meaning strangers or people from a distance. The differences lie in vocabulary and in word forms. Motu says matā for a scraper where Tafiti says volu, and kautoga for guava where Tafiti says lala. Other pairs differ only in shape, as with afule and hafule.

How Niuean sounds differ from Tongan

Tongan distinguishes taʻu, "year", from tau, "fight". Niuean has no glottal stop, so both became tau. The sound s arose from t before i and e, which is why the old loan tī, from English tea, has that shape while later loans such as telefoni keep their t. Every syllable ends in a vowel, so borrowed consonant clusters are broken up: tractor became tuleketā. Stress falls almost always on the second-to-last syllable.

The spelling is largely phonemic, with one letter to one sound. The traditional alphabet runs ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, fā, gā and on to rō and sā, the two introduced letters, at the end. Macrons can mark long vowels, but writers do not always use them.