Mangareva

Mangareva, self-called te reo magareva, is a Polynesian language of the Marquesic subgroup, spoken in the Gambier Islands, whose largest island bears the same name, and closely related to Marquesan and Hawaiian. Polynesians had settled Mangareva by the twelfth or thirteenth century and traded by canoe with Pitcairn to the east; the fourteenth-century migration from Easter Island left Mangarevan and the Easter Island language sharing much of their vocabulary.

The British captain James Wilson, reaching the islands in the ship Duff in 1797, gave the group its European name after Admiral Gambier. French missionaries who arrived in 1834, aided by a New Zealand Māori interpreter, were the first to write the language, and rendered its glottal stop with the letter h.