The photospheric spatial distribution of the main magnetic polarities of bipolar active regions (ARs) presents during their emergence deformations are known as magnetic tongues. They are attributed to the presence of twist in the toroidal magnetic flux-tubes that form the ARs. The aim of this article is to study the twist of newly emerged ARs from the evolution of magnetic tongues observed in photospheric line-of-sight magnetograms. We apply the procedure described by Poisson et al. (2015, Solar Phys. 290, 727) to ARs observed over the full Solar Cycle 23 and the beginning of Cycle 24. Our results show that the hemispherical rule obtained using the tongues as a proxy of the twist has a weak sign-dominance (53 % in the southern hemisphere and 58 % in the northern hemisphere). By defining the variation of the tongue angle, we characterize the strength of the magnetic tongues during different phases of the AR emergence. We find that there is a tendency of the tongues to be stronger during the beginning of the emergence and to become weaker as the AR reaches its maximum magnetic flux. We compare this evolution with the emergence of a toroidal flux-rope model with non-uniform twist. The variety of evolution of the tongues in the analyzed ARs can only be reproduced when using a broad range of twist profiles, in particular having a large variety of twist gradient in the direction vertical to the photosphere. Although the analytical model used is a special case, selected to minimize the complexity of the problem, the results obtained set new observational constraints to theoretical models of flux-rope emergence that form bipolar ARs.
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