East Futunan

East Futunan, called Fakafutuna by its speakers, is the Polynesian language of Futuna and neighbouring Alofi, the smaller and far more remote half of the French collectivity of Wallis and Futuna. It is a Nuclear Polynesian language whose closest relatives are Wallisian, Samoan and Tokelauan, and it has the classically small Polynesian sound system: eleven consonants including a phonemic glottal stop, five vowels contrasting short and long, and strictly open (C)V syllables. Its earliest written record is a list of 118 words collected by the Dutch navigators Schouten and Le Maire in 1616, among the oldest wordlists for any Polynesian language. Most speakers today live not on Futuna itself but in New Caledonia, and in everyday writing the macrons and glottal-stop apostrophes are usually dropped for want of keyboards. With French dominating school and administration, the language is classed as endangered.