Ethnonyms: Māʼohi, taʼata Tahiti, Tahitians, Tahitiens
Total population: 180,000-185,000
Ethnolinguistic classification: Austronesian → Malayo-Polynesian → Oceanic → Central Pacific → East Central Pacific → Polynesian → Nuclear Polynesian → Eastern Polynesian → Central-Eastern Polynesian → Tahitic
Homeland: Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia, South Pacific Ocean
Regions with significant populations: French Polynesia, Tahiti
Languages and dialects: Tahitian, French
Religion: Christianity (majority), Protestantism, Catholic Church, Tahiti and Society Islands mythology
The Tahitians—often called Māʼohi in contemporary Tahitian identity discourse, and historically also described as taʼata Tahiti—are the Indigenous Polynesian people of Tahiti and, more broadly, French Polynesia, a society whose identity is deeply tied to seafaring ancestry, genealogy, land, and language. Scholars and cultural institutions describe Māʼohi as a self-designation that became widely adopted from the 1970s and 1980s onward; Bruno Saura notes that older speakers sometimes reserved the word for plants and animals, while modern political and cultural movements came to use it as an assertion of indigenous dignity and collective identity. Their deeper roots are usually placed within the wider Polynesian world: Britannica traces Polynesian settlement to Lapita-related voyaging peoples from East Asia/Southeast Asia who spread through Oceania, and Tahiti’s own early society is described as one that developed on the basis of extended-family organization, temple-centered authority, and ranked political districts. In cultural life, Tahitian language—reo Tahiti, also called reo Māʼohi—remains central, even though French is the official language of French Polynesia; one source on the islands states that Tahitian is the most common language and is spoken or understood across the archipelagos, and Britannica notes that the Tahitian language is treated as a fundamental element of cultural identity. Tahitian identity is also visibly embodied in performance traditions: Tahiti Tourisme explains that dance was long banned under missionaries from the 1820s, later revived in the 1950s, and is now celebrated at Heiva i Tahiti, while costumes draw directly on the environment through vegetable fiber, flowers, seashells, feathers, tapa cloth, coconut shells, and grass skirts. Contemporary Tahitian/Māʼohi identity therefore combines deep cultural continuity with colonial interruption and revival, and IWGIA describes Māʼohi Nui (French Polynesia) as a former French colony whose Indigenous population continues to press for stronger recognition of Polynesian languages and related cultural rights.
