Tongic

Tongic is the Polynesian subgroup made up of Tongan, the language of the kingdom of Tonga, and Niuean. Lapita voyagers had carried Tongan's ancestors to Tongatapu by the ninth century BC. By the twelfth century the Tuʻi Tonga chiefs spread Tongan influence across the central Pacific, and settlers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries left a deep mark on the language of ʻUvea.

Tongan preserves the old Polynesian glottal stop, written with the turned comma called fakauʻa, and keeps the l sound that most sister languages merged with r. Dutch sailors Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire made the first word lists in 1616; Abel Tasman called at Tongatapu in 1643.

Protestant missionaries arrived in 1797 and the Wesleyan minister Walter Lawry in 1822; under their work the language gained a Latin-script missionary alphabet. The future king George Tāufaʻāhau was baptised in 1831.