The product of the authors’ 12 years’ residence (1979‐1991) in Tuvalu as missionaries of the Watchtower Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses, this concise summary of essential features of the Polynesian language of the former Ellice Islands is to be welcomed as being decidedly more accessible for lay readers than other recent works.
Geoff and Jenny Jackson make no claim to providing a complete, exhaustive analysis of the Tuvaluan language, orthographically rendered by Donald Kennedy in 1945 as te ngangana a te Tuvalu, by Niko Besnier in 1981 as te ggana Tuvalu and by the Jackson team in 1993 (in their Tuvaluan‐English dictionary) as te ‘gana Tuvalu. Rather, they write for “the average person who does not know a lot about grammar”. They hope to help those who would like to learn the Tuvaluan language. They stress the need for the assistance of a native speaker, and for persistent listening and practice.
An Introduction to Tuvaluan is organised in 25 brief sections devoted to the indispensable minimum data, simply presented and lucidly explained, with Tuvaluan words and phrases highlighted in bold typeface. The background to the Tuvaluan language, the alphabet and pronunciation, and dialects are firstly adequately outlined, along with an exposition of the semantic importance of stressed consonants (indicated by an initial ) and lengthened vowels, for example:
kaiga rubbish ka‐iga family kaiga meal
Other sections discuss nouns, verbs, pronouns and other traditional grammatical categories; directionals; locationals; emphatic words; questions: positive and negative; reduplication; word order; conditional; particles, prepositions, and conjunctions; prefixes and suffixes; numbers; the calendar; everyday expressions; books of the Bible.
The card covers bear colour photographs of a palm‐lined lagoon and of Tiefu (Geoff) working with an informant. Charming, evocative line drawings of Tuvaluan artefacts and scenes punctuate and enhance the text. This is a competent introduction, likely to be of definite help to students of Polynesian languages with no prior acquaintance with Tuvaluan. It is recommended to libraries with specialist interest in linguistics and in Pacific languages and cultures.
