Tuvaluan
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Tuvaluan is the main language spoken in Tuvalu, a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean, and belongs to the Polynesian language family. It matters because it is central to the cultural identity and daily communication of Tuvaluan people, though like many indigenous languages, it faces challenges from the spread of English and globalization.
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Recording of Paulo, a speaker of Tuvaluan Tuvaluan (Te Ggana Tuuvalu) is a Polynesian language of the Ellicean group native to Tuvalu. It is more or less distantly related to all other Polynesian languages, such as Hawaiian, Māori, Tahitian, Samoan, Tokelauan and Tongan, and most closely related to the languages spoken on the Polynesian Outliers in Micronesia and Northern and Central Melanesia. Tuvaluan has borrowed considerably from Samoan, the language of Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The population of Tuvalu is approximately 10,645 people (2017 Mini Census), but there are estimated to be more than 13,000 Tuvaluan speakers worldwide. In 2015, it was estimated that more than 3,500 Tuvaluans live in New Zealand, with about half that number born in New Zealand and 65 percent of the Tuvaluan community in New Zealand is able to speak Tuvaluan.