पुकापुकन

Pukapukan (Te Reo Pukapuka), spoken by ~2,000 people on the isolated Pukapuka Atoll in the northern Cook Islands and on nearby Nassau, is one of the most genealogically debated Polynesian languages: traditionally classed as a Samoic-Outlier yet showing East Polynesian and possibly Tokelauan substrate features, the result of pre-contact wave migrations across the central Pacific. It has typical Polynesian phonology with phonemic vowel length and glottal stop, but lexically diverges enough from Cook Islands Māori (rar) that the two are not mutually intelligible. The community is small but linguistically vital, with active orthography work since the 1990s.