Rakahanga-Manihiki language

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Rakahanga-Manihiki
Spoken in:	Cook Islands
Region:	Rakahanga and Manihiki islands
Total speakers:	5000 (1981 Wurm and Hattori)
Language family:	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian(MP) Central-Eastern MP Eastern MP Oceanic Central-Eastern Oceanic Remote Oceanic Central Pacific East Fijian-Polynesian Polynesian Nuclear Polynesian Eastern Polynesian Central E. Polynesian Tahitic Rakahanga-Manihiki
Official status
Official language in:	Cook Islands
Regulated by:	Kopapa Reo
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`–`
ISO 639-3:	`rkh`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Rakahanga-Manihiki is a Cook Islands Maori dialectal variant^[1] belonging to the Polynesian languages family, spoken by about 2500 people on Rakahanga and Manihiki Islands (part of the Cook Islands) and another 2500 in other countries, mostly New Zealand and Australia. Wurm and Hattori consider Rakahanga Manihiki as a distinct language with "limited intelligibility with Rarotongan"^[2] (i.e. the Cook Islands Maori dialectal variant of Rarotonga). According to the New Zealand Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) who spent few days on Rakahanga in the years 1920, "the language is a pleasing dialect and has closer affinities with Maori than with the dialects of Tongareva, Tahiti, and the Cook Islands"^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ "Reo Maori Act" (2003)
^ Wurm and Hattori,"atlas of Pacific area" (1981), the only source of the SIL and ISO 639-3 codification
^ "Ethnology of Manihiki and Rakahanga", Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1932. This book was the source of Wurm and Hattori Atlas

[edit] Indicative bibliography

Manihikian Traditional Narratives: In English and Manihikian: Stories of the Cook Islands (Na fakahiti o Manihiki). Papatoetoe, New Zealand: Te Ropu Kahurangi.1988
E au tuatua ta'ito no Manihiki, Kauraka Kauraka, IPS, USP, Suva. 1987.
"No te kapuaanga o te enua nei ko Manihiki (the origin of the island of Manihiki)", in JPS, 24 (1915), p.140-144.