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Tongans or Tongan people are a Polynesian ethnic group native to Tonga, a Polynesian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Tongans represent more than 98% of the inhabitants of Tonga. The rest are European (the majority are British ), mixed European, and other Pacific Islanders .
Tonga is about 1,800 km (1,100 mi; 970 nmi) from New Zealand's North Island. Tonga was first inhabited roughly 2,500 years ago by the Lapita civilization, Polynesian settlers who gradually evolved a distinct and strong ethnic identity, language, and culture as the Tongan people.
The Tonga language of Zambia is spoken by about 1.38 million people in Zambia and 137,000 in Zimbabwe; it is an important lingua franca in parts of those countries and is spoken by members of other ethnic groups as well as the Tonga. [6] (The Malawian Tonga language is classified in a different zone of the Bantu languages.)
Tonga has evolved its own version of Western-style clothing, consisting of a long tupenu, or sarong, for women, and a short tupenu for men. Women cover the tupenu with a kofu , or Western-style dress; men top the tupenu either with a T-shirt, a Western casual shirt, or on formal occasions, a dress shirt and a suit coat.
Not much is known about Tonga before European contact because of the lack of a writing system during prehistoric times other than the oral history told to the early European explorers. The first time the Tongan people encountered Europeans was in April 1616 when Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten made a short visit to the islands to trade with ...
Mano was the first to reach land; weak from hunger and dehydration, he could not stand but called out that he had safely reached shore, and the rest followed him. [7] After escaping the sea, the boys dug a cave by hand and hunted seabirds for meat, blood, and eggs.
Tongans, people from Tonga; Tongan language, the national language of Tonga; Tong'an District, a district in Xiamen, Fujian, China; See also. Tonga (disambiguation)
In the 1930s, Tonga had a population of about 32,000. Starting in the 1970s large scale migration began to Australia and New Zealand. By the 1970s the emigration rate from Tonga to Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada, France and the United States was over 2% annually. [2] The country has over 100,000 residents.