Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
The umbrella term Pacific Islands has taken on several meanings. [1] Sometimes it is used to refer only to the islands defined as lying within Oceania. [2] [3] [4] At other times, it is used to refer to the islands of the Pacific Ocean that were previously colonized by the British, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, or Japanese, or by the United States.
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]
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 ...
A follow-up study by Kayser et al. (2008) discovered that only 21% of the Polynesian autosomal gene pool is of Melanesian origin, with the rest (79%) being of East Asian origin. [21] A study by Friedlaender et al. (2008) confirmed that Polynesians are closer genetically to Micronesians, Taiwanese Aborigines, and East Asians, than to Melanesians.
The Polynesian triangle. Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through the islands of Southeast Asia – most likely starting out from Taiwan, [9] as tribes whose natives were thought to have previously arrived from mainland South China about 8000 years ago – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, through the Philippines and Indonesia.
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.
On the eastern edge of the Federated States of Micronesia, the languages Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi represent an extreme westward extension of the Polynesian branch of Oceanic. Finally, there are two Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken in Micronesia that do not belong to the Oceanic languages: Chamorro in the Mariana Islands and Palauan in Palau.