Tahitian (autonym: reo Tahiti, pronounced [ˈreo tahiti], part of reo Māʼohi, [ˈreo ˈmaːʔohi], languages of French Polynesia)[2] is a Polynesian language, spoken mainly on the Society Islands in French Polynesia.

Tahitian is the most prominent of the indigenous Polynesian languages spoken in French Polynesia (reo māʼohi).

[2][3] The latter also include:[4] When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti at the end of the 18th century, there was no writing system and Tahitian was only a spoken language.

Aboard the Endeavour, Lt. James Cook and the ship's master, Robert Molyneux, transcribed the names of 72 and 55 islands respectively as recited by the Tahitian arioi, Tupaia.

[6] In 1797, Protestant missionaries arrived in Tahiti on a British ship called Duff, captained by James Wilson.

A system of five vowels and nine consonants was adopted for the Tahitian Bible, which would become the key text by which many Polynesians would learn to read and write.

For example, pāto, meaning 'to pick, to pluck' and pato, 'to break out', are distinguished solely by their vowel length.

However, macrons are seldom written among older people because Tahitian writing was not taught at school until 1981.

Usage of this diacritic was promoted by academics but has now virtually disappeared, mostly because there is no difference in the quality of the vowel when the trema is used and when the macron is used.

Although the use of ʼeta and tārava is equal to the usage of such symbols in other Polynesian languages, it is promoted by the Académie tahitienne and adopted by the territorial government.

As the ASCII apostrophe (U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE) is the character output when hitting the apostrophe key on a usual French AZERTY keyboard, it has become natural for writers to use the punctuation mark for glottal stops, although to avoid the complications caused by automatic substitution of basic punctuation characters for letters in digital documents, and the confusion with the regular apostrophe used in multilingual texts mixing Tahitian with French (where the apostrophe marks the elision of a final schwa at end of common pronouns, prepositions or particles, and the orthographic suppression of the separating regular space before a word starting by a vowel sound, in order to indicate a single phonemic syllable partly spanning the two words), the saltillo (U+A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO) may be used instead.

Tahitian is one of the few Austronesian languages – along with standard Samoan or Volow – that do not have a phoneme /k/, and do not use the letter K. In its morphology, Tahitian relies on the use of "helper words" (such as prepositions, articles, and particles) to encode grammatical relationships, rather than on inflection, as would be typical of European languages.

It is a very analytic language, except when it comes to the personal pronouns, which have separate forms for singular, plural and dual numbers.

Like many Austronesian languages, Tahitian has separate words for inclusive and exclusive we, and distinguishes singular, dual, and plural.

Typologically, Tahitian word order is VSO (verb–subject–object), which is typical of Polynesian languages, or verb-attribute-subject for stating verbs/modality (without object).

Some examples of word order are:[21] tēPRS.CONTtāmāʼaeatneiPRS.CONTauItē tāmāʼa nei auPRS.CONT eat PRS.CONT I"I am eating"ʼuaPFVtāpūchopvauIʼiOtethevahiewoodʼua tāpū vau ʼi te vahiePFV chop I O the wood"I chopped the wood"ʼuaPFVhohonibitehiaPASʼoiaheebytetheʼūrīdogʼua hohoni hia ʼoia e te ʼūrīPFV bite PAS he by the dog"He was bitten by the dog"earemeathingmarōdrytethehaʼaricoconute mea marō te haʼariare thing dry the coconut"The coconuts are dry"eistaʼatamanpūaistrongʼoiahee taʼata pūai ʼoiais man strong he"He is a strong man"The article te is the definite article and means 'the'.

For example; Verbal aspect and modality are important parts of Tahitian grammar, and are indicated with markers preceding and/or following the invariant verb.

In order to avoid offense, all words resembling such a name were suppressed and replaced by another term of related meaning until the personage died.

means 'to stand', but in Tahitian it became tiʼa because the word was included in the name of king Tū-nui-ʼēʼa-i-te-atua.