Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino

Native peoples > Rapa Nui

Language

Rapa Nui is a living language that belongs to a Polynesian subgroup of the larger Austronesian language family. In this language, the same morphological unit can act as a noun, adjective or verb, while grammatical categories indicating gender, number and time are expressed using prefixes and suffixes. Rapa Nui is an oral language for everyday use.