Tokelauan Language – 2

London Missionary Society, learning Samoan and gaining some measure of religious instruction on Somoan language. Few later returned to Tokelau with books printed in Samoan and accepted Protestant teachers from the Samoan mission in 1861. They are taught in Samoan. By 1870s, that Samoan was very widely understood throughout the Tokelauan atolls.

In September 1947, the crucial step for Tokelauan was that it came to be a written language — due, almost entirely, to the perspicacity and interest of one Roman Catholic priest, Father Alexander McDonald arrived in Nukunonu one of the three atolls.  He established a school in which English was taught. He also became proficient in Tokelauan and developed an orthography which was later to be followed in schools on the other islands as well and to gain some currency in official circles.

Father McDonald had introduced teachers from the other two islands to write Tokelauan, and between 1954 and 1964 six small Tokelau school journals were published from Wellington using the orthography which he had developed. The first of these — probably the first document ever printed in Tokelauan — was written by Peato Perez, the Nukunonu catechist.  Later issues, all written by Tokelau teachers, published Tokelau folktales and further accounts of visits to New Zealand.

Further important changes also took place in Tokelau education during the 1960s. “Education Officers” were established on each island to supervise the introduction of the New Zealand primary curriculum. Samoan was no longer to be either taught or used in the schools, and local teachers were encouraged to develop teaching materials in Tokelauan for the junior classes. This exercise alone served to heighten many Tokelau teachers’ awareness of their language, as they debated orthographic conventions, elementary grammatical principles and morphemic boundaries to be used in the written material they provided for their classes.

Another important innovation was the provision of a simple, inexpensive duplicating machine in each school. Each island could now put out occasional “newspapers” written in Tokelauan by teachers and students, and these were widely distributed and enthusiastically read by parents and others.

The duplicating machines also encouraged other, strictly local, writing projects, e.g., a local history (Hooper and Kirifi 1970), a Tokelau-English dictionary (Kirifi and Webster 1975), and a book of Tokelau recipes (I. Perez 1980).

The increased status and wider use of written Tokelauan during the 1970s pointed up the need for a grammar and dictionary of the language. Sharpies’ Tokelau Syntax (Ph.D. thesis 1976) was an exercise in academic linguistics rather than a reference grammar, and Sister Veronica’s typescript “Notes on the Grammar of Tokelauan” suffered from being couched wholly in the grammatical categories of English. The first Tokelau lexicon, by D. W. Boardman, was published by the New Zealand Department of Education in 1969 and contained some 1,200 Tokelau entries followed by about the same number of English ones.