The ancestors of modern Polynesians were Lapita navigators, who settled in the Tonga and Samoa areas about 3,000 years ago. Linguists and archaeologists estimate that this first population went through common development during about 1000 years, giving rise to Proto-Polynesian, the linguistic ancestor of all modern Polynesian languages. After that period of shared development, the Proto-Polynesian society split into several descendant populations, as Polynesian navigators scattered around various archipelagoes across the Pacific – some travelling westwards to already populated areas, others navigating eastwards and settling in new territories (Society Islands, Marquesas, Hawaii, New Zealand, Rapa Nui, etc.).
Still today, Polynesian languages show strong similarity, particularly cognate words in their vocabulary; this includes culturally important words such as tapu, ariki, motu, fenua, kava, and tapa as well as *sawaiki, the mythical homeland for some of the cultures.[2]
Internal classification
Phylogenetic classification
Polynesian languages fall into two branches, Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian. Tongan and Niuean constitute the Tongic branch; all the rest are part of the Nuclear Polynesian branch.[3]
The contemporary classification of the Polynesian languages began with certain observations by Andrew Pawley in 1966 based on shared innovations in phonology, vocabulary and grammar showing that the East Polynesian languages were more closely related to Samoan than they were to Tongan, calling Tongan and its nearby relative Niuean "Tongic" and Samoan and all other Polynesian languages of the study "Nuclear Polynesian".[5]
Previously, there had been lexicostatistical studies[6][7] that squarely suggested a "West Polynesian" group composed of at least Tongan and Samoan and that an "East Polynesian" group was equally distant from both Tongan and Samoan.
Pawley published another study in 1967.[8] It began the process of extracting relationships from Polynesian languages on small islands in Melanesia, the "Polynesian Outliers", whose languages Pawley was able to trace to East Futuna in the case of those farther south and perhaps to Samoa itself in the case of those more to the north.
Except for some minor differentiation of the East Polynesian tree, further study paused for almost twenty years until Wilson[9] published a study of Polynesian pronominal systems in 1985 suggesting that there was a special relationship between the East Polynesian languages and all other Nuclear Polynesian but for Futunic, and calling that extra-Futunic group the "Ellicean languages". Furthermore, East Polynesian was found to more likely have emerged from extra-Samoan Ellicean than out of Samoa itself, in contradiction to the long assumption of a Samoan homeland for the origins of East Polynesian. Wilson named this new group "Ellicean" after the pre-independence name of Tuvalu and presented evidence for subgroups within that overarching category.
Marck,[10] in 2000, was able to offer some support for some aspects of Wilson's suggestion through comparisons of shared sporadic (irregular, unexpected) sound changes, e.g., Proto-Polynesian and Proto-Nuclear-Polynesian *mafu 'to heal' becoming Proto-Ellicean *mafo. This was made possible by the massive Polynesian language comparative lexicon ("Pollex" – with reconstructions) of Biggs and Clark.[11]
Certain regular correspondences can be noted between different Polynesian languages. For example, the Māori sounds /k/, /ɾ/, /t/, and /ŋ/ correspond to /ʔ/, /l/, /k/, and /n/ in Hawaiian. Accordingly, "man" is tangata in Māori and kanaka in Hawaiian, and Māori roa "long" corresponds to Hawaiian loa. The famous Hawaiian greeting aloha corresponds to Māori aroha, "love, tender emotion". Similarly, the Hawaiian word for kava is ʻawa.
Similarities in basic vocabulary may allow speakers from different island groups to achieve a significant degree of understanding of each other's speech. When a particular language shows unexpectedly large divergence in vocabulary, this may be the result of a name-avoidance taboo situation – see examples in Tahitian, where this has happened often.
Many Polynesian languages have been greatly affected by European colonization. Both Māori and Hawaiian, for example, have lost many speakers to English, and only since the 1990s have they resurged in popularity.[12][13]
Grammatical characteristics
Personal pronouns
In general, Polynesian languages have three numbers for pronouns and possessives: singular, dual and plural. For example, in Māori: ia (he/she), rāua (they two), rātou (they 3 or more). The words rua (2) and toru (3) are still discernible in endings of the dual and plural pronouns, giving the impression that the plural was originally a trial (threesome) or paucal (a few), and that an original plural has disappeared.[14] Polynesian languages have four distinctions in pronouns and possessives: first exclusive, first inclusive, second and third. For example, in Māori, the plural pronouns are: mātou (we, exc), tātou (we, inc), koutou (you), rātou (they). The difference between exclusive and inclusive is the treatment of the person addressed. Mātou refers to the speaker and others but not the person or persons spoken to (i.e., "I and some others, but not you"), while tātou refers to the speaker, the person or persons spoken to, and everyone else (i.e., "You and I and others").
a and o possession
Many Polynesian languages distinguish two possessives. The a-possessives (as they contain that letter in most cases), also known as subjective possessives, refer to possessions that must be acquired by one's own action (alienable possession). The o-possessives or objective possessives refer to possessions that are fixed to someone, unchangeable, and do not necessitate any action on one's part but upon which actions can still be performed by others (inalienable possession). Some words can take either form, often with a difference in meaning. One example is the Samoan word susu, which takes the o-possessive in lona susu (her breast) and the a-possessive in lana susu (her breastmilk). Compare also the particles used in the names of two of the books of the Māori Bible: Te Pukapuka a Heremaia (The Book of Jeremiah) with Te Pukapuka o Hōhua (The Book of Joshua); the former belongs to Jeremiah in the sense that he was the author, but the Book of Joshua was written by someone else about Joshua. The distinction between one's birth village and one's current residence village can be made similarly.
Written Polynesian languages use orthography based on Latin script. Most Polynesian languages have five vowel qualities, corresponding roughly to those written i, e, a, o, u in classical Latin. However, orthographic conventions for phonemes that are not easily encoded in standard Latin script had to develop over time. Influenced by the traditions of orthographies of languages they were familiar with, the missionaries who first developed orthographies for unwritten Polynesian languages did not explicitly mark phonemic vowel length or the glottal stop. By the time that linguists trained in more modern methods made their way to the Pacific, at least for the major languages, the Bible was already printed according to the orthographic system developed by the missionaries, and the people had learned to read and write without marking vowel length or the glottal stop.
This situation persists in many languages. Despite efforts at reform by local academies, the general conservative resistance to orthographic change has led to varying results in Polynesian languages, and several writing variants co-exist. The most common method, however, uses a macron to indicate a long vowel, while a vowel without that diacritical mark is short, for example, ā versus a. Sometimes, a long vowel is instead written double, e.g. Maaori.
The glottal stop (not present in all Polynesian languages, but, where present, one of the most common consonants) is indicated by an apostrophe, for example, 'a versus a. Hawaiʻian uses the ʻokina, also called by several other names, a unicameralconsonant letter used within the Latin script to mark the phonemicglottal stop. It is also used in many other Polynesian languages, each of which has its own name for the character. Apart from the ʻokina or the somewhat similar Tahitian ʻeta, a common method is to change the simple apostrophe for a curly one, taking a normal apostrophe for the elision and the inverted comma for the glottal stop. The latter method has come into common use in Polynesian languages.
Notes and references
Notes
↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Polynesian languages". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History..
↑ Pawley, Andrew, 1966, Polynesian languages: a subgrouping based upon shared innovations in morphology. Journal of the Polynesian Society 75(1):39–64. JSTOR20704348.
↑ Pawley, Andrew, 1967, The relationships of Polynesian Outlier languages. Journal of the Polynesian Society 76(3):259–296. JSTOR20704480.
↑ Wilson, William H., 1985, Evidence for an Outlier source for the Proto-Eastern-Polynesian pronominal system. Oceanic Linguistics 24(1/2):85-133. doi:10.2307/3623064. JSTOR3623064.
↑ Marck, Jeff (2000), Topics in Polynesian languages and culture history. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
↑ Indeed Fijian, a language closely related to Polynesian, has singular, dual, paucal, and plural; and even there we may see the paucal replacing the plural in generations to come, as the paucal currently can be used for a group from 3 up to as many as 10, usually with some family, workgroup or other association.
Pacific Islanders, Pasifika, Pasefika, Pacificans, or rarely Pacificers are the peoples of the Pacific Islands. As an ethnic/racial term, it is used to describe the original peoples—inhabitants and diasporas—of any of the three major subregions of Oceania or any other island located in the Pacific Ocean.
Polynesians are an ethnolinguistic group comprising closely related ethnic groups native to Polynesia, which encompasses the islands within the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean. They trace their early prehistoric origins to Island Southeast Asia and are part of the larger Austronesian ethnolinguistic group, with an Urheimat in Taiwan. They speak the Polynesian languages, a branch of the Oceanic subfamily within the Austronesian language family. The Indigenous Māori people form the largest Polynesian population, followed by Samoans, Native Hawaiians, Tahitians, Tongans, and Cook Islands Māori.
Tongan is an Austronesian language of the Polynesian branch native to the island nation of Tonga. It has around 187,000 speakers. It uses the word order verb–subject–object.
Niuean is a Polynesian language, belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian languages. It is most closely related to Tongan and slightly more distantly to other Polynesian languages such as Māori, Samoan, and Hawaiian. Together, Tongan and Niuean form the Tongic subgroup of the Polynesian languages. Niuean also has a number of influences from Samoan and Eastern Polynesian languages.
The Polynesian Triangle is a region of the Pacific Ocean with three island groups at its corners: The US state of Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand (Aotearoa). This is often used as a simple way to define Polynesia.
Marquesan is a collection of East-Central Polynesian dialects, of the Marquesic group, spoken in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. They are usually classified into two groups, North Marquesan and South Marquesan, roughly along geographic lines.
The Samoic–Outlier languages, also known as Samoic languages, are a purported group of Polynesian languages, encompassing the Polynesian languages of Samoa, Tuvalu, American Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, and Polynesian outlier languages in New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the Federated States of Micronesia. The name "Samoic-Outlier" recognizes Samoan.
Nuclear Polynesian refers to those languages comprising the Samoic and the Eastern Polynesian branches of the Polynesian group of Austronesian languages.
Polynesian outliers are a number of culturally Polynesian societies that geographically lie outside the main region of Polynesian influence, known as the Polynesian Triangle; instead, Polynesian outliers are scattered in the two other Pacific subregions, Melanesia and Micronesia. Based on archaeological and linguistic analysis, these islands are considered to have been colonized by seafaring Polynesians, mostly from the area of Tonga, Samoa and Tuvalu.
Polynesian culture is the culture of the indigenous peoples of Polynesia who share common traits in language, customs and society. The development of Polynesian culture is typically divided into four different historical eras:
Proto-Polynesian is the hypothetical proto-language from which all the modern Polynesian languages descend. It is a daughter language of the Proto-Austronesian language. Historical linguists have reconstructed the language using the comparative method, in much the same manner as with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic. This same method has also been used to support the archaeological and ethnographic evidence which indicates that the ancestral homeland of the people who spoke Proto-Polynesian was in the vicinity of Tonga, Samoa, and nearby islands.
Tuamotuan, Paʻumotu or Paumotu is a Polynesian language spoken by 4,000 people in the Tuamotu archipelago, with an additional 2,000 speakers in Tahiti.
Wallisian, or ʻUvean, is the Polynesian language spoken on Wallis Island. The language is also known as East Uvean to distinguish it from the related West Uvean language spoken on the outlier island of Ouvéa near New Caledonia. The latter island was colonised from Wallis Island in the 18th century.
Futunan or Futunian is the Polynesian language spoken on Futuna. The term East-Futunan is also used to distinguish it from the related West Futunan (Futuna-Aniwan) spoken on the outlier islands of Futuna and Aniwa in Vanuatu.
Mangareva, Mangarevan is a Polynesian language spoken by about 600 people in the Gambier Islands of French Polynesia and by Mangarevians emigrants on the islands of Tahiti and Moorea, located 1,650 kilometres (1,030 mi) to the North-West of the Gambier Islands.
Polynesia is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including linguistic relations, cultural practices, and traditional beliefs. In centuries past, they had a strong shared tradition of sailing and using stars to navigate at night.
Takuu is a Polynesian language from the Ellicean group spoken on the atoll of Takuu, near Bougainville Island. It is very closely related to Nukumanu and Nukuria from Papua New Guinea and to Ontong Java and Sikaiana from Solomon Islands.
Bible translations into Oceanic languages have a relatively closely related and recent history.
Nuguria (Nukuria) is a Polynesian language, spoken by approximately 550 people on Nuguria in the eastern islands of Papua New Guinea. The language was taught in primary schools in Nuguria and was used for daily communications between adults and children. Nuguria is one of the eighteen small islands to the east of Papua New Guinea, which are known as the Polynesian Outliers. The Nukuria language has been concluded to be closely related to other nearby languages such as Nukumanu, Takuu, Nukuoro, and Luangiua. Research on the Nuguria Atoll and the language itself is scarce; past research demonstrated that this language was at risk of potential endangerment. The language was only then classified as at risk of endangerment because it was still used between generations and was passed on to the children. However, recent research indicates that Nukuria is now most likely an extinct language.
Sikaiana is a Polynesian language, spoken by about 730 people on Sikaiana in the Solomon Islands.
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