Tikopian is also spoken by the Polynesian minority on Vanikoro, who long ago migrated from Tikopia.
Tikopians occasionally visited other islands, but these trips were limited by the large distances and great hazards involved in canoe ocean voyages.
Contacts by Westerners began sporadically around the beginning of the nineteenth century, but in 1927, when Firth did his initial fieldwork in Tikopia, the indigenous culture was largely intact.
Much of the Tikopian life style has remained intact, but the forces of Westernization have been making inroads throughout the twentieth century.
Out of the living languages five are institutional, twenty-four are developing, twenty-six are vigorous, eight are in trouble, and eight are dying.
According to the Tikopia dictionary, "This has typographical simplicity, but may present a problem of interpretation as to where long vowel and rearticulation actually occur.
[clarification needed] Dodenhoff uses the following orthography:[14] The basic word order in Tikopia is Subject-Verb-Object, but sometimes they use the Verb-Subject-Object Typology.
Words derived from English: Most of the recorded documents on this language come from the linguist Raymond Firth.
Raymond Firth spent a lot of his time making sure that Tikopia did not fall close to being extinct.