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Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family. Polynesian languages show a considerable degree of similarity. The vowels are generally the same—/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, pronounced as in Italian, Spanish, and German—and the consonants are always followed by a vowel.
Map of Melanesia, showing its location within Oceania Melanesia is one of three major cultural areas of the Pacific Ocean islands, along with Micronesia and Polynesia. Outline of sovereign (orange) and dependent islands (yellow) Melanesia (UK: / ˌ m ɛ l ə ˈ n iː z i ə / ⓘ, US: / ˌ m ɛ l ə ˈ n iː ʒ ə /) is a subregion of Oceania ...
The origin of Melanesians is generally associated with the first settlement of Australasia by a lineage dubbed 'Australasians' or 'Australo-Papuans' during the Initial Upper Paleolithic, which is "ascribed to a population movement with uniform genetic features and material culture" (Ancient East Eurasians), and sharing deep ancestry with modern East Asian peoples and other Asia-Pacific groups.
Oceania is generally considered the least decolonized region in the world. In his 1993 book France and the South Pacific since 1940, Robert Aldrich commented: . With the ending of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands became a 'commonwealth' of the United States, and the new republics of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia signed ...
Melanesia is the great arc of islands located north and east of Australia and south of the Equator. The name derives the Greek words melas ('black') and nēsos ('island') for the predominantly dark-skinned peoples of New Guinea island, the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), New Caledonia, and Fiji.
It is from this nucleus that the Fijian group seems to have been identified. Linguistics allows us to define that, despite the differences in appearance between Polynesians and Fijians (the latter being generally more Melanesian in appearance), the Polynesian groups that populated the central Pacific islands migrated from this area.
Nonetheless, both groups show admixture, along with other Austronesian populations outside of Taiwan, indicating varying degrees of intermarriage between the incoming Neolithic Austronesian settlers and the preexisting Paleolithic Australo-Melanesian populations of Island Southeast Asia and Melanesia. [32] [33] [34]
The first known dwellings of the ancestors of Māori were based on houses from their Polynesian homelands (Māori are known to have migrated from eastern Polynesia no later than 850 A.D.). The Polynesians found they needed warmth and protection from a climate markedly different from the warm and humid tropical Polynesian islands.