Concept
Tokelauan (toʊkəˈlaʊən) is a Polynesian language spoken in Tokelau and on Swains Island (or Olohega) in American Samoa. It is closely related to Tuvaluan and is related to Samoan and other Polynesian languages. Tokelauan has a co-official status with English in Tokelau. There are approximately 4,260 speakers of Tokelauan, of whom 2,100 live in New Zealand, 1,400 in Tokelau, and 17 in Swains Island. "Tokelau" means "north-northeast". Loimata Iupati, Tokelau's resident Director of Education, has stated that he is in the process of translating the Bible from English into Tokelauan. While many Tokelau residents are multilingual, Tokelauan was the language of day-to-day affairs in Tokelau until at least the 1990s, and is spoken by 88% of Tokelauan residents. Of the 4600 people who speak the language, 1600 of them live in the three atolls of Tokelau – Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo. Approximately 3000 people in New Zealand speak Tokelauan, and the rest of the known Tokelauan speakers are spread across Australia, Hawaii, and the West Coast of the United States. The Tokelauan language closely resembles its more widely spoken and close genealogical relative, Samoan; the two maintain a degree of mutual intelligibility. Horatio Hale was the first person to publish a Tokelauan dictionary of sorts, which he did in 1846. Rather than being the accepted definition of dictionary, it was a reference that only contained 214 entries of vocabulary. Hale's publication remained the only published Tokelauan reference until 1969. However, Tokelauan had been instituted into schools in the late 1940s; prior to the publication, there was not much headway made in the teaching of the language. In 1969, the New Zealand Department of Education published D. W. Boardman's Tokelau-English Vocabulary. This second, more advanced reference was a collection of around 1200 vocabulary entries. In the times that passed after the second publication, the necessity of a more detailed and in depth reference to the language for the purpose of education with the Tokelauan community was realized by Hosea Kirifi (who later became the first Tokelau Director of Education) and J.