Lesson 48: Suffixes

Tongan has a set of productive suffixes that create new nouns, adjectives, and verbs from existing words. Where the prefix faka- attaches to the front of a word, suffixes attach to the end.

A suffix is a short element added after a word to change its meaning or function. English does this too: "teach" becomes "teacher" with the suffix -er. Tongan suffixes work the same way, and once you learn them, you can decode unfamiliar words on sight and create new ones yourself.