Tokelauan

How the dictionaries grew

Horatio Hale published the first Tokelauan dictionary in 1846, a list of 214 words. It stayed the only reference until 1969, although Tokelauan had entered the schools in the late 1940s. In 1969 the New Zealand Department of Education published D. W. Boardman's Tokelau-English Vocabulary, with around 1,200 entries. In 1975 Hosea Kirifi, later the first Tokelau Director of Education, and J. H. Webster published the Tokelau-English Dictionary, with an estimated 3,000 items.

Why h and f can trade places

The sounds written h, s, f and wh can be used interchangeably: toha and tofa both mean 'goodbye'. The h and wh come from an older dialect and f and s from a newer one, and neither displaced the other. The alphabet is A, E, I, O, U, F, G, K, L, M, N, P, H, T and V. A long vowel takes the main stress; otherwise it falls on the second-to-last vowel, and a word keeps its stress inside a compound.

Where the speakers live

More than half of Tokelauan speakers live in New Zealand, about a third on the three atolls, and the rest in Australia, Hawaii and the western United States. Older people in Tokelau speak both Tokelauan and Samoan; younger ones, schooled under the newer system, lean toward English. In New Zealand's 2001 census, 44% of people with a Tokelauan background could hold a conversation in the language, against 53% in 1996. Tokelauan is also recorded historically on Swains Island, or Olohega, in American Samoa.