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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 ...
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 ...
However, their eastward expansion halted when they reached the western Polynesian islands of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga by around 900 BC. This remained the furthest extent of the Austronesian expansion in the Pacific for approximately 1,500 years, during which the Lapita culture in these islands abruptly lost the technology of pottery-making for ...
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.
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).
Tongan (English pronunciation: / ˈ t ɒ ŋ (ɡ) ə n / TONG-(g)ən; [3] [4] [5] [a] lea fakatonga) is an Austronesian language of the Polynesian branch native to the island nation of Tonga. It has around 187,000 speakers. [ 6 ]
Samoa's long history of various ruling families continued until well after the decline of the Tui Manuʻa's power, with the western isles of Savaiʻi and Upolu rising to prominence in the post-Tongan occupation period and the establishment of the tafaʻifa system that dominated Samoan politics well into the 20th century.