Lea Faka-Tonga · Lessons

Tongan word order: the verb comes first

Naʻe ʻalu ʻa Sione is "Sione went", and read straight through it runs "past, go, Sione". That is the pattern this page is about: tense marker, then verb, then the person doing the action. English puts the subject first and the verb second, and in this pattern Tongan puts the verb before the noun that does it. Two other shapes sit alongside it, and both turn up further down: a pronoun subject moves in front of the verb, and a ko sentence has no verb at all.

The second sentence adds an object, and two markers appear: ʻe in front of the doer and ʻa in front of the thing the action lands on. Those two markers, plus the rule that pronouns behave differently from names, carry most of the work in the patterns below. The rest of this page is each piece in turn.

A pronoun sits in front of the verb

When the subject is a pronoun rather than a name, it does not follow the verb. It goes between the tense marker and the verb, so the sentence reads marker, pronoun, verb.

Those two sentences say the same kind of thing about different subjects, and the subject has moved from one side of the verb to the other. That is the first thing to get comfortable with, because everything else on this page follows from it.

A name goes after the verb, and takes ʻa

Three things change together when the subject is a name instead of a pronoun. The name moves after the verb, the marker ʻa appears in front of it, and the tense marker changes shape.

ʻA is a focus marker, which means it marks the noun closest in thought to the action of the verb. In a sentence with no object, the subject is the only noun connected to the verb, so ʻa marks the subject. Later on this page an object turns up and ʻa shifts to it.

Why the past marker changes from naʻa to naʻe

Look down the table above and the past marker is naʻá on the left and naʻe on the right, and the future marker is té on the left and ʻe on the right. One rule covers both pairs: naʻa and te are the forms used immediately before a pronoun, and naʻe and ʻe are used everywhere else.

The present marker ʻoku and the perfect marker kuo have no second form the way naʻa and te do, so there is no marker to swap: ʻOku ʻalu ʻa Sione and Kuo hiva ʻa Tēvita keep the same marker their pronoun versions use.

The word for "he" disappears when a name is present

You do not say the pronoun and the name together. Once a noun subject is in the sentence, the third-person singular pronoun ne drops out and the noun takes over its job entirely.

When the action lands on something

Compare Naʻe lea ʻa Sione (Sione spoke) with Naʻe lau ʻe Sione ʻa e tohí (Sione read the book). Nothing is being spoken at in the first sentence, so the verb has no object and the subject takes ʻa. The second has an object, the book, and the subject switches to ʻe.

A verb with no object is called intransitive and a verb with an object is called transitive, and the labels are worth knowing only because the marker on the subject depends on which kind you have. The choice is fixed: the subject of a verb with an object takes ʻe, never ʻa. Naʻe ʻalu ʻe Sione is wrong, because ʻalu (go) takes no object, and the sentence is Naʻe ʻalu ʻa Sione. One qualifier, taken up in Lesson 19: when the object is general and carries no article, it fuses with the verb into a single unit, and the subject goes back to ʻa.

Because ʻe marks the doer, grammar books call it the agent marker. In front of a name it stands alone, and in front of an ordinary noun it picks up the article he, the same way the prepositions ki he, ʻi he and mei he do.

The whole pattern in one line

With both a doer and a thing done to, the tense marker and verb come first, and the two nouns follow: the doer marked ʻe, the thing done to marked ʻa. Either noun may come first, and the examples on this page put the doer first.

The last two show the pronoun rule holding: a pronoun subject is still in front of the verb, and the object follows the verb as usual.

Either noun can come first

When the doer and the thing done to are both nouns, either may be placed first after the verb, and the sentence means the same thing.

The markers carry the roles, so the order is free to carry the emphasis instead. ʻE Tēvita means "by Tēvita" wherever it sits, and ʻa Kōlaiate means "Kōlaiate, the one it happened to" wherever it sits. The difference between the two sentences is the same kind of difference English gets from turning an active sentence around into a passive one.

Leaving the doer out

Drop the ʻe phrase from a sentence like that and what remains is the Tongan equivalent of an English passive. The verb itself is not altered, because Tongan has no separate passive verb form; the sentence is the same transitive sentence with nobody named as the doer.

Where a question word goes

Compare ʻOku nofo ʻa ʻAna ʻi ʻapi ('Ana lives at home) with ʻOku nofo ʻi fē ʻa ʻAna? (Where does 'Ana live?). The question word has taken the slot the answer would occupy, between the verb and the noun subject, which pushes the subject to the end.

Tongan adds no helper verb to ask a question, and does not swap the subject and verb the way English does with "does" and "did". The question word stands where the answer would have stood.

Sentences with no subject, and sentences with no verb

Weather sentences have no subject at all. Naʻe ʻuha is "it rained" and ʻOku lāʻā is "it is sunny", each one a tense marker and a verb and nothing else. English needs the word "it" in that slot and Tongan does not.

There is also a whole sentence type with no verb and no tense marker, built on ko, used for saying what something is: Ko e fala ʻeni is "this is a mat". That pattern has its own page, linked below.

Build one and see

Word order is the part of Tongan that stops being difficult once your hands have built a few sentences rather than only read them, so the builder below assembles one tile by tile and the picker drills the one choice that decides the shape.

• Build a Tongan sentence word by word
• Drill: ʻa, ʻe, or ʻe he
• Drill: name the sentence type from its first word
• Lesson 1: the basic sentence
• Lesson 15: noun subjects
• Lesson 19: word order when the verb has an object
• Sentences with no verb: the ko pattern
• Tongan tense markers explained

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