Rapa Nui

An Eastern Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, native to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), a special territory of Chile. Ethnologue counts roughly 1,000 native speakers, and both Ethnologue and UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classify it as endangered, with heavy influence from Chilean Spanish in the speech of most remaining speakers; Glottolog notes that a form of Rapa Nui without Spanish loanwords is prized in local political discourse even though it is not how most speakers actually talk. The island's undeciphered rongorongo script is often associated with the language in popular accounts, but no proposed decipherment has withstood testing against the corpus, and specialists disagree sharply on whether the system even encodes speech phonetically at all rather than functioning as, for instance, a mnemonic aid for oral performance; this link should be read as a genuinely open question, not an established fact.