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The contemporary classification of the Polynesian languages began with certain observations by Andrew Pawley in 1966 based on shared innovations in phonology, vocabulary and grammar showing that the East Polynesian languages were more closely related to Samoan than they were to Tongan, calling Tongan and its nearby relative Niuean "Tongic" and ...
The vast majority either inhabit independent Polynesian nation-states (Samoa, Niue, Cook Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu) or form minorities in countries such as Australia, Chile (Easter Island), New Zealand, France (French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna), and the United States (Hawaii and American Samoa), as well as in the British Overseas ...
Map of Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. According to Samoan oral tradition, Tonga was once under the dominion of the Tui Manu'a and paid tribute to the revered paramount chief. [3] In the tenth century this dominance waned and eventually supplanted by the Tuʻi Tonga Empire. While Manu'a under the Tui Manu'a remained independent, the rest of Samoa paid ...
Much of the U.S. Tongan community resides in California. In San Mateo County (0.7% of the county's population) in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are over 5,000 Tongan Americans, mainly concentrated in Daly City, East Palo Alto, San Mateo, and San Bruno. There is a Tongan community in Oakland, of about 1,500 people (0.3% of Oakland's population).
In many Polynesian languages, including Tongan, the word tonga (Tongan:), [11] [12] [13] comes from fakatonga, which means 'southwards', and the archipelago is so named because it is the southernmost group among the island groups of western Polynesia. [14]
Located in Oceania, Tonga is a small archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, directly south of Samoa and about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand. It has 169 islands, 36 of them inhabited, which are in three main groups – Vavaʻu , Haʻapai , and Tongatapu – and cover an 800-kilometre (500-mile)-long north–south line.
Samoans or Samoan people (Samoan: tagata Sāmoa) are the Indigenous Polynesian people of the Samoan Islands, an archipelago in Polynesia, who speak the Samoan language. The group's home islands are politically and geographically divided between the Independent State of Samoa and American Samoa , an unincorporated territory of the United States ...
Samoan (Gagana faʻa Sāmoa or Gagana Sāmoa, pronounced [ŋaˈŋana ˈsaːmʊa]) is a Polynesian language spoken by Samoans of the Samoan Islands. Administratively, the islands are split between the sovereign country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa .