Learn Tongan Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Tongan passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Polynesian language of the Kingdom of Tonga, 17-letter Latin alphabet plus the fakauʻa (glottal stop) and macrons (toloi), VSO word order, distinctive royal vocabulary, ~190,000 speakers.

Tap any word for instant translation

Every word in your Tongan reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help — useful for navigating Tongan's three speech registers.

Read about topics you choose

Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Tongan reading passage — from ‘Ikai I tai (Sea Sunday) hymns to rugby news.

What is Tongan and where is it spoken?

Tongan (lea faka-Tonga) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, official in the Kingdom of Tonga and spoken by around 190,000 people across Tonga, New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It is closely related to Niuean and Samoan and is one of the few remaining indigenous monarchical languages — used in royal court ceremony.

What's distinctive about Tongan grammar?

Tongan uses VSO word order and an ergative-absolutive system: the subject of a transitive verb takes the particle ‘e (Na‘e taa‘i ‘e Sione ‘a Mele 'John hit Mary'). It has three socially graded vocabularies — common, polite (for chiefs) and royal (for the monarch). Tongan also distinguishes inclusive vs exclusive 'we' and uses postposed possessive pronouns.