Tuvaluan

What Samoan missionaries changed

Samoan came to Tuvalu with Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used for government acts, literacy teaching and church until Tuvaluan replaced it in the 1950s. Tuvaluan borrowed from it considerably. The missionaries also suppressed oral traditions they judged un-Christian. Gilbertese, spoken natively on Nui, mattered while the colonial administration sat in the Gilbert Islands, and English has gained ground since independence in the 1970s.

How the northern and southern dialects divide

Northern Tuvaluan covers Nanumea, Nanumaga and Niutao; Southern Tuvaluan covers Funafuti, Vaitupu, Nukufetau and Nukulaelae. All are mutually intelligible, and northern speakers often keep their own dialect in public. Nui is the exception, with a dialect of Gilbertese. Tuvaluan is also intelligible to speakers of Tokelauan.

Why the usual spelling misses long sounds

The first major work on Tuvaluan syntax was Donald Gilbert Kennedy's handbook of 1945. Niko Besnier later wrote a phonemic description, but the spelling most Tuvaluans use is modelled on Samoan and often leaves geminate consonants and long vowels unmarked, though length changes meaning.

What migration means for the language

In 2002 Tuvalu reached an agreement with New Zealand allowing the migration of 11,000 Tuvaluans, the whole population, as rising seas threaten the islands. In 2015 more than 3,500 Tuvaluans were estimated to live in New Zealand, and 65% of that community could speak Tuvaluan. Some grammar survives only in verbal art: the passive is obsolete except in folklore and old songs.