Vosa Vaka Viti

Fijian, self-called Na vosa vaka-Viti after Viti, the indigenous name for the islands, is an Austronesian language of the Central Pacific branch and the speech of the iTaukei, the indigenous Fijians. It was carried to the archipelago by the first Austronesian settlers in the second millennium BC.

It shares a common ancestor with the Polynesian languages, though the eastern dialects have also taken in Tongan words. The standard language was built on the speech of Bau, an islet off Viti Levu which rose to dominate eastern Fiji around the turn of the nineteenth century.

European navigators first reached the group in the seventeenth century, and Captain James Cook spread the Tongan form of its name, Fiji. From 1835 Australian Methodist missionaries began giving the Bauan standard a written form.