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Polynesia is one of three major cultural areas of the Pacific Ocean islands, along with Melanesia and Micronesia. Subregions (Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Australasia), as well as sovereign and dependent islands of Oceania Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian Triangle.
The US-administered areas of Micronesia have a unique experience that sets them apart from the rest of the Pacific. Micronesia has great economic dependency on its former or current motherlands, something only comparable to the French Pacific. Sometimes, the term American Micronesia is used to acknowledge the difference in cultural heritage. [51]
The name Melanesia (in French, Mélanésie) was first used in 1832 by French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville: he coined the terms Melanesia and Micronesia to go alongside the pre-existing Polynesia to designate what he viewed as the three main ethnic and geographical regions forming the Pacific.
The 1982 edition of the South Pacific Handbook, by David Stanley, groups Australia, New Zealand, Norfolk Island and the islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia under the more restrictive label of the "South Pacific Islands", even though Hawaii and most islands in Micronesia technically lie in the North Pacific. He additionally includes ...
The 2007 book Asia in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West, by New Zealand Pacific scholar Ron Crocombe, considers the phrase Pacific Islands to politically encompass American Samoa, Australia, the Bonin Islands, the Cook Islands, Easter Island, East Timor, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, the Galápagos Islands, Guam, Hawaii, the Kermadec Islands, Kiribati, Lord Howe ...
Oceania with its sovereign states and dependent territories within the subregions Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Definitions of Oceania vary. [21] [22] [7] The broadest definition encompasses the many islands between mainland Asia and the Americas.
From Polynesia, "reverse" migrations occurred westwards, and some islands in Micronesia and Melanesia, the Polynesian outlier, speak Polynesian languages. [ 22 ] These distributions show that the linguistic groupings are far from corresponding to the traditional subdivisions of Austronesian Oceania: Micronesia , Melanesia , and Polynesia .
The region commonly termed "Polynesia" includes thousands of islands, most of them arranged in a rough triangle bounded by Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand.Outside this Polynesian Triangle, in areas commonly designated Micronesia and Melanesia, lie about two dozen islands, most of them small and remote, whose inhabitants speak Polynesian languages.