Māori vs Samoan and Tongan: how similar are they?

Put Māori vs Samoan side by side, with Tongan as the third, and the same words keep turning up in slightly different spellings: tangata ‘person’ is Samoan tagata and Tongan tangata, and wai ‘water’ is vai in both. The differences are regular, so a handful of rules turns a large share of Samoan and Tongan basic vocabulary back into Māori. The surprise is which of the two is the closer relative.

Updated 17 October 2026 · 8 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

The short answer

All three are Polynesian languages and descend from one ancestor, Proto-Polynesian, which is thought to have been spoken in Tonga, Samoa and the islands near them. Samoan is the closer relative of Māori: it sits on the same main branch of the family, and Tongan sits on the other. But Tongan kept two sounds, k and ng, exactly where Māori did, while Samoan changed or respelt them, so many everyday Tongan words look more like Māori than the Samoan ones do. Knowing the correspondences lets a Māori speaker recognise words in both. It does not make either language understandable without learning it.

Where Samoan and Tongan sit on the family tree

The Polynesian family splits first into two branches. Tongan and Niuean form the Tongic branch; every other Polynesian language belongs to Nuclear Polynesian. The split was first argued by the linguist Andrew Pawley in 1966, from changes in grammar and vocabulary that the Eastern Polynesian languages share with Samoan but not with Tongan.

• Tongic: Tongan, Niuean.
• Nuclear Polynesian, which divides again: Samoan, usually grouped with Tokelauan as Samoic; the Polynesian languages of Tuvalu and of small islands further west; and Eastern Polynesian, which includes Māori, Cook Islands Māori, Tahitian, Hawaiian and Rapa Nui.

So Samoan and Māori share an ancestor, Proto-Nuclear-Polynesian, that Tongan does not. Within Eastern Polynesian, Māori’s nearest relatives are Cook Islands Māori and Tahitian, and Hawaiian is a cousin: that side of the family is set out in Māori vs Hawaiian.

The sound correspondences

Proto-Polynesian had thirteen consonants. Each daughter language merged or dropped some of them, and did so consistently, which is why the correspondences below hold word after word. The first column is the Māori letter; the examples run Māori / Samoan / Tongan.

Two rows look alike and are not. Proto-Polynesian had both an l and an r. Māori turned both into r and Samoan turned both into l, so those two languages cannot tell them apart; Tongan kept the l and lost the r. That is why Tongan has tolu for three but ua for two, and why linguists can still tell which of the two sounds a Māori r comes from: they look at Tongan.

The last two consonant rows are Tongan’s alone. Proto-Polynesian had an h and a glottal stop, and both Samoan and Māori lost them; Tongan kept both, and also turned the old s into h. So a Tongan h can stand for a sound Samoan writes s (hala, sala) or for one Samoan and Māori simply dropped (hiva, iva, iwa). The Tongan glottal stop, written ʻ and called the fakauʻa, is always written, and it is a different sound in origin from Samoan’s ʻ, which stands for an old k.

Closer on the family tree, further on the page

Look down the first two rows of that table and Tongan seems to be Māori’s twin: tangata, kai, koe and ngutu are spelt exactly as in Māori, and Tongan’s word for fish is ika, as Māori’s is. The Samoan words, tagata, ʻai, ʻoe, gutu and iʻa, look further away. Yet Samoan is the closer relative.

Two things are going on. The first is spelling. Samoan g is not a hard g: it is the same ng sound as Māori ng, written with one letter, so spoken tagata is much closer to tangata than it looks. The second is how family trees are drawn. Two languages are grouped together because they share changes, not because they kept the same old features. Tongan and Māori both kept the ancestral k, and keeping something tells you nothing about who is related to whom. Samoan changed its k to a glottal stop on its own, after its branch had separated from Māori’s, and Pawley’s evidence for putting Samoan and Māori together is a set of changes the two branches made jointly, before they parted, which Tongan never made.

Two ways of speaking Samoan

Samoan adds a twist of its own. Formal Samoan, tautala lelei (“proper Samoan”), is the language of news broadcasts, sermons and writing, and it uses t, n and ng as spelt. Casual Samoan, tautala leaga, often called “K speech”, is used at home and among friends and equals. In it t can be said k, and n merges with ng:

• tama (boy) is said kama; Māori has tama ‘son, boy’.
• ono (six) is said ongo; Māori has ono ‘six’.
• tautala (to speak) is said kaukala.

So in a casual Samoan conversation a Māori listener hears plenty of ks, but almost none of them line up with Māori k. A spoken Samoan k is usually a Māori t, while a Māori k has become a glottal stop. Hawaiian has made the same t-to-k shift permanently, which is why tapu is Hawaiian kapu; in Samoan it is a matter of how formally you are speaking.

Numbers 1 to 10 in Māori, Samoan and Tongan

Two to nine follow the rules in the table above, with one wrinkle: Tongan nima has an n where Samoan and Māori have l and r. One is a near miss. Māori tahi and Samoan tasi go back to the same Nuclear Polynesian word, while POLLEX traces Tongan taha to a slightly different ancestral form.

Ten is where the three part company, and where there is a story. Samoan sefulu and Tongan hongofulu both contain the old Polynesian word for ten, and Samoan still uses it to build the tens: thirty is tolugafulu or tolu sefulu. Māori replaced it with tekau ‘ten’, which Te Aka says originally meant twenty. Tongan has the same word: Churchward’s Tongan dictionary gives tekau as “twenty, score”, used when counting yams, fish and coconuts. How Māori builds the numbers beyond ten out of tekau is in Māori numbers, days and months.

Everyday words in all three

Every row below is a cognate set in POLLEX, the Polynesian Lexicon Project, checked against Te Aka for the Māori. The meanings overlap but are not always identical.

Not every resemblance is that tidy. Samoan fafine and Tongan fefine are “woman”, and Māori has wahine ‘woman’, but the Māori word went through an extra change shared with its Eastern Polynesian neighbours, faf- to wah-, and POLLEX files it under its own Eastern Polynesian ancestor rather than in the same set.

Can a Māori speaker understand Samoan or Tongan?

Not without learning it. The one study that tested Polynesian listeners, Jack Ward’s at the University of Hawaiʻi between 1959 and 1961, played a recording of a Māori speaker to Samoan listeners, who translated under a third of the key words in the Māori sentences correctly. The study, and its limits, are described in Māori vs Hawaiian. The correspondences explain why: they make individual words recognisable once you have seen them written down, but at conversational speed, with different grammatical particles, glottal stops in unexpected places and Samoan’s casual k, there is too little to hold on to.

Samoan and Tongan in New Zealand

In New Zealand the three languages are neighbours in a literal sense. At the 2023 census 213,849 people could hold an everyday conversation in te reo Māori, 110,541 in Samoan and 37,752 in Tongan. That makes Samoan the most widely spoken language in the country after English and Māori, narrowly ahead of Mandarin. In the Auckland region alone, 75,066 people speak Samoan and 29,460 speak Tongan.

Learning one after the other

If you already speak Samoan or Tongan, Māori will feel familiar quickly. Swap v for w, f for wh and l for r; from Samoan, put a k back wherever there is a glottal stop and read g as ng; from Tongan, drop the h and ʻ that Māori lost. What will not transfer is the particles and the many words where the languages chose differently. Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course teaches the Māori words in the order they are most used, with Papa Reo’s native te reo voice on every example.

Sources

1. Greenhill, S. J. and Clark, R. POLLEX-Online: The Polynesian Lexicon Project Online (Māori from Williams and Biggs, Samoan from Pratt, Tongan from Churchward and Mariner).
2. Te Aka Māori Dictionary.
3. Pawley, A. (1966). Polynesian languages: a subgrouping based upon shared innovations in morphology. Journal of the Polynesian Society 75(1): 39–64.
4. Wikipedia: Polynesian languages (classification, after Lynch, Ross and Crowley 2002).
5. Wikipedia: Proto-Polynesian language (homeland and sound correspondences).
6. Wikipedia: Samoan language (registers, after Hunkin 2009 and Ochs 1988; numerals).
7. Wikipedia: Tongan language (retention of *h and *ʔ, loss of *r, the fakauʻa, numerals).
8. Wiktionary: ika (Tongan).
9. Ward, J. H. (1962). Mutual intelligibility between certain Polynesian speech communities. MA thesis, University of Hawaiʻi.
10. Stats NZ, 2023 Census: languages spoken, via Figure.NZ.
11. Stats NZ, 2023 Census: languages spoken in the Auckland Region, via Figure.NZ.
12. Stats NZ. Measuring te reo Māori speakers: a guide to different data sources (the census question, “could you have a conversation about a lot of everyday things?”).