Tuesday, June 4, 2013

79. Tonga -Intruduction

Tonga , officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is a sovereign state and an archipelago comprising 176 islands scattered over 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) of the southern Pacific Ocean. Fifty-two of these islands are inhabited.
Lengthwise, the Kingdom stretches over a distance of about 800 kilometres (500 mi) in a north-south line located about a third of the distance from New Zealand to Hawaii.
Tonga is the only island nation in the region to have avoided formal colonisation. In 2010, it took a decisive step towards becoming a fully functioning constitutional monarchy, after legislative reforms paved the way for its first partial representative elections.
In many Polynesian languages, Tongan included, the word tonga means "south", as the archipelago is the southernmost group of islands of central Polynesia. In Tongan, the name is pronounced as [ˈtoŋa], and it is commonly pronounced as /ˈtɒŋə/ or /ˈtɒŋɡə/ in English. The name of Tonga is cognate to the Hawaiian region of Kona.