Lea Faka-Tonga · Lessons

The Tongan alphabet, and how every letter sounds

Tongan has seventeen letters: the five vowels a e i o u, eleven consonants f h k l m n ng p s t v, and the fakauʻa, the small raised mark that stands for a catch in the throat. A letter always spells the same sound. There are no silent letters, every syllable ends in a vowel, and so does every word. That is the whole system, which is why you can read any Tongan word aloud once you know the letters.

Three things carry meaning that an English speaker is likely to skip: the length of a vowel, the catch in the throat, and where the stress lands. Each one can turn a word into a different word, so this page gives all three their own section.

The five vowels

The vowels hold steady values, closer to Spanish or Italian than to English, where the same letter wanders from one word to the next.

A long vowel is a different word

A line over a vowel is the macron, ā ē ī ō ū, called the toloi in Tongan. It means the vowel is held longer. The length is not decoration and not an accent: it changes which word you have said.

The same word can take more than one macron and change again: kaka is to climb, kakā is a parrot, and kākā is to cheat.

Two vowels together stay two sounds

When two vowels meet, sound each one clearly. English blurs a vowel pair into a single glide; Tongan does not, and a blurred pair is heard as a different word.

The consonants

Most of the eleven are near enough to English to read on sight. Four are worth a note before you say your first word.

Two consonants never sit side by side. A vowel always separates them, which is why ng, written with two letters, counts as one.

The fakauʻa, the catch in the throat

The fakauʻa is a full consonant, as real as t or k. It is the glottal stop: the little catch in the middle of the English "uh-oh". It is the easiest letter to skip over and one of the most expensive to lose, because it separates pairs of words that are otherwise identical.

Because it is a letter, it gets its own mark: a small raised comma leaning like an opening quote. In print it often stands in as a plain apostrophe, but it is never punctuation.

Syllables

Every Tongan syllable is one of two shapes: a single vowel, or one consonant followed by one vowel. There is no third shape, so any word breaks apart on sight. fakataha, to assemble, is fa-ka-ta-ha. tangata, man, is ta-nga-ta, three syllables and not four, because ng is one consonant. ō, the plural of "go", is a single vowel and a whole word.

Where the stress falls

Stress lands on the second-to-last syllable: fá-le (house), fo-nú-a (country), fa-ka-ma-tá-la (explanation). Two regular shifts move it.

First, a long final vowel pulls the stress onto itself: kumā, rat, is stressed on the final ā and not on the u.

Second, when a common noun is made definite with the article e or he, meaning "the", the stress jumps to the last vowel of the phrase. Grammarians call that the definitive accent, and it is doing real work: it is part of how Tongan says "the".

This course marks stress with an acute accent wherever it is not obvious, so you will read he falé, Té u ʻalu (I will go), Naʻá ku ʻalu (I went). The mark is a reading aid rather than part of everyday Tongan spelling, and it is there to train your ear until the rhythm arrives on its own.

Say it out loud, then start reading

The sound system is the short part of Tongan. Once the letters are steady, the rest of the language is grammar, and the first lesson is a three-word sentence.

• Start with lesson 1, the basic sentence
• All 52 lessons, free
• Vocabulary flip cards

Tongan greetings and what they mean · Tongan tense markers explained · Tongan word order · Saying "not" in Tongan · Tongan possessives · The Tongan ko pattern