Rapa Nui

Rapa Nui is an Eastern Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island, the isolated southeastern outpost of Polynesia. The island's first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, landed on Easter Sunday in 1722.

Its grammar most closely resembles Marquesan, while its sound system is conservative like that of Māori, retaining consonants that related languages have lost. Before European contact the islanders may have recorded the older language in rongorongo, glyphs cut into wooden tablets and mastered by a small literate elite who treated the tablets as sacred. The glyphs are undeciphered, so the older spoken language survives chiefly in chants and oral tradition.