Tongan is the language of the Kingdom of Tonga, a Pacific kingdom that kept its own monarchy through the colonial era, and of Tongan communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It is also a language where the right word depends on who you are talking about. In church, that question has one answer above all others.
Tongan arrives as text. Here is what that means for your guests, in three lines.
No. A speaker cannot preach in Tongan and have the room follow. The talk comes from the stage in one of the spoken languages, and Tongan is one of the languages it arrives in.
No. Tongan is a text language here. Your guest follows the talk on their phone screen rather than in an earbud, while the room carries on in its own language.
Yes. The whole talk in Tongan, on a phone or on the big screen, with the glottal stop and the long vowels written as Tongans write them.
Several pages in this section show real sentences from our own system. We publish sample lines only after a native speaker has read them, and for Tongan that has not happened yet. If you read Tongan, we would welcome your help.
Tongan has a vocabulary of respect that goes far beyond being polite. Many everyday words have one form for ordinary people, another for chiefs and nobles, and a third kept for the king. Even the word for eating changes, depending on who is eating.
Church Tongan reaches for the highest level. When a congregation prays, sings or reads the Bible, it uses the respectful vocabulary for God, and a sentence that puts the ordinary word in that place sounds careless at best.
This is the hardest thing about translating into Tongan, and the first thing a Tongan reader will judge. Your church can help: if there are words your congregation always uses for God, for Jesus and for the Holy Spirit, add them to Keywords, so the same word arrives every time.
In Tonga the church is not one part of life among others. It is woven into the way the country is governed.
In the nineteenth century, the chief who united Tonga and became its first king, George Tupou I, became a Methodist, and the faith spread with the kingdom. Methodist churches remain among the largest in Tonga.
Tonga's constitution keeps Sunday as a holy day. Most work stops, and the day belongs to church and family.
Tongan was first written down by Methodist missionaries in the nineteenth century, and the Bible they translated gave church Tongan the formal register it still carries.
Many Tongans live outside the kingdom, in Auckland, in Sydney and Melbourne, and in Utah and California, and a church sits at the centre of almost every one of those communities. A Tongan congregation abroad is a place to worship, to speak the language, to keep family ties and to hand the culture on to children born somewhere else.
That last point matters for captions. The children and grandchildren of those who came often understand spoken Tongan far better than they read it, while their grandparents read it fluently. Expect a Tongan family to split: the older members choosing Tongan, the younger ones choosing English, all in the same row.
Small details that a Tongan guest will notice you noticed.
Tongan writes a glottal stop with a mark like an apostrophe, the fakauʻa, as in ʻofa, love. Leave it out and you may have written a different word.
The Tongan word for love also carries care, generosity and duty to family and church. When a Tongan reader meets the love of God in a caption, the whole weight of that word comes with it.
Many Tongans wear formal church clothes, including the taʻovala, a woven mat worn around the waist as a sign of respect. Nobody will expect it of you, but it tells you how seriously the day is taken.
A few things that make the difference on the first Sunday.
Not with MulingStream. Tongan is a language guests read here, so the talk needs to come from the stage in one of the spoken languages, such as English. Tongan captions then follow every sentence.
That is what we aim for, and it is where your church can help most. Add the words your congregation uses for God and for Jesus to Keywords, and they come through the same way every time. If you see a word that is wrong, send it to us.
Not at all. Run both. Each person picks their own language on their phone, and one family can follow the same service in two languages side by side.
Yes. Tongan is written in the Latin alphabet with the glottal stop mark and long vowel marks, and it displays on any screen without special fonts.
Tonga's Polynesian neighbour, and the other pages in this section.
Or open the full list of 200+ and check the three columns for the languages your room actually needs.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guests need nothing but the phone already in their pocket.