Wallisian

How Wallisian speakers show respect

Wallisian has three registers. The honorific is the chiefly language: royals use it, and commoners use it to address a royal or God and to speak about them. The commoner register is ordinary Wallisian, and a third register is vulgar or derogatory. To remain is ʻafio in the honorific, nofo in commoner speech and tagutu in the vulgar register.

Where Wallisian borrowed its words

In the 19th century Wallisians used a pidgin English with traders and New England whalers, and about 70 of its words survive, among them laisi, rice, and pepa, paper. More English arrived with the American military base of 1942: motoka, car, and puna, spoon. Missionaries brought Latin, so Jesus Christ is Sesu Kilisito and hola, from hora, means hour; they also gave old words Christian senses, and Tohi tapu, sacred book, is the Bible. French has since supplied Falanise, France, Lepupilika, Republic, and kafe, coffee, and in the 2000s young people began mixing the two languages in speech.

What French schooling did to Wallisian

French has been a school language since 1961. In 1968 and 1969 a pupil caught speaking Wallisian had to wear the lid of a corned beef tin as a necklace and write an hour-long French composition at the weekend, until the next offender took the lid. Wallisians answered by teaching the language to middle school children, and after the community obtained FM and AM transmitters in 1979 it ran radio channels in Wallisian.

The glottal stop is written ʻ and called the fakamoga. Pierre Bataillon compiled the first vocabulary in 1840, revised it in 1871 and saw it printed only in 1932; Karl Rensch built his Wallisian and French dictionary of 1984 on it, without macrons.