Tongan is a Polynesian language spoken mainly on the island of Tonga in the Pacfic, and also in Samoa, Fiji, Niue, Vanuatu and a number of other coutries.

Alphabet. Tongan is presently written in a subset of the Latin script. In the old, "missionary" alphabet, the order of the letters was modified: the vowels were put first and then followed by the consonants: a, e, i, o, u, with variation of letter ā.

Here is a wee tune to help you learn the Tongan Alphabet, one we grew up with. The ' mark that we know as the apostrophe is called a fakau'a. It is a letter ...

Fakaʻua (glottal stop) is considered a consonant and the last letter in the Tongan alphabet; The first step in learning and understanding any language is to listen. Fanongo ki he ongo! Listen to the sounds that each letter makes. Check out the Tongan Alphabet sung by myself and my daughter. We had fun doing this amateur clip.

The Tongan language is exclusively phonetic, that is to say, Tongan words are spelled the way they are pronounced and pronounced the way they are spelled. In the first lesson, there is a pronunciation of each letter in the Tongan alphabet, including the mysterious fakau’a, or the glottal stop.