Eo Enana

Eo Enana, or Marquesan, is a chain of Polynesian dialects spoken across the Marquesas Islands, which voyagers from western Polynesia settled around the twelfth or thirteenth century. It splits into North Marquesan and South Marquesan; the Tai Pi speech of eastern Nuku Hiva is sometimes counted as a language of its own.

The northern dialects keep the old Polynesian k sound that Tahitian has lost, while the south replaces it with n or a glottal stop and turns the northern h into f. For centuries the language was spoken but not written.

The Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña reached the islands in 1595 and named them after the Marquis of Cañete. William Pascoe Crook, the first Protestant missionary to settle there, lived in the islands from 1797 to 1799, after which Marquesan began to be recorded in the Latin alphabet.