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Not much is known about Tonga before European contact because of the lack of a writing system during prehistoric times other than the oral history told to the early European explorers. The first time the Tongan people encountered Europeans was in April 1616 when Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten made a short visit to the islands to trade with ...
Around 2850 BP, the Lapita people reached Tonga, and carbon dating places their landfall first in Tongatapu and then in Haʻapai soon after. [3] The newcomers were already well adapted to the resource-scarce island life and settled in small communities of a few households [3] on beaches just above high tide line that faced open lagoons or reefs.
Queen Salote of Tonga: The Story of an Era 1900-1965 (ISBN 1-86940-205-7) Latukefu, S. (1974), Church and State in Tonga, ANU Press, Canberra; Campbell, Ian C; Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern, 2001, ISBN 0-908812-96-5 "Brief history of the Kingdom of Tonga", on the website of the Tongan Parliament
Tongans or Tongan people are a Polynesian ethnic group native to Tonga, a Polynesian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Tongans represent more than 98% of the inhabitants of Tonga. The rest are European (the majority are British ), mixed European, and other Pacific Islanders .
The word tonga is cognate to the Hawaiian word kona meaning 'leeward', which is the origin of the name for the Kona District in Hawaiʻi. [15] Tonga became known in the West as the "Friendly Islands" because of the congenial reception accorded to Captain James Cook on his first visit in 1773.
The Tonga language of Zambia is spoken by about 1.38 million people in Zambia and 137,000 in Zimbabwe; it is an important lingua franca in parts of those countries and is spoken by members of other ethnic groups as well as the Tonga. [6] (The Malawian Tonga language is classified in a different zone of the Bantu languages.)
The history of Tonga stretches back to around roughly 1000 AD, [12] when the Polynesians arrived. Tonga became known as the Tongan Empire through extensive trading and its influence and show of strength and domination over parts of the Pacific (e.g. Samoa, Fiji). The Europeans arrived in the 17th century which was followed after a couple ...
The Indigenous Māori people form the largest Polynesian population, [9] followed by Samoans, Native Hawaiians, Tahitians, Tongans, and Cook Islands Māori. [ citation needed ] As of 2012 [update] , there were an estimated 2 million ethnic Polynesians (both full and part) worldwide.