Oceanic Languages

Oceanic Languages, group of about 500 languages belonging to the Austronesian language family. The Austronesian family consists of an extremely large number of languages spread over a huge geographical area, many of which are spoken by small communities in remote areas. Not surprisingly, the few scholars who have attempted to classify the whole family have proposed different sub-groupings, some using the term “Eastern Austronesian” instead of “Oceanic”.

One classification system divides Austronesian languages into a Formosan branch and a Malayo-Polynesian branch and places the Oceanic languages in the Eastern sub-branch of Malayo-Polynesian. Oceanic languages are then subdivided into three geographical groups—Admiralty Islands, Western Oceanic, and Central-Eastern Oceanic. The Admiralty Islands group consists of 31 languages spoken in Papua New Guinea; the Western Oceanic languages comprise 237 languages, also spoken in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Indonesia; and more than 200 Central-Eastern languages are spoken across a vast area embracing the Easter Islands, New Zealand (where Maori is a member), Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti. While there are approximately 2 million (1990) speakers of Oceanic languages, many individual languages are spoken by small communities ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand people. The larger languages in the group are Fijian, with more than 300,000 native speakers, Samoan, with more than 200,000, and Tongan, Tahitian, and Maori, each with around 100,000.

Oceanic languages have a simple sound system, with no final consonants, few or no initial consonant clusters, and five vowels. A distinctive grammatical feature is the complex possessive construction. In Fijian, for example, the thing possessed is classified as belonging to one of four different categories—familiar possession (for example, body parts, kin relations), edible possession (for instance, food and tobacco), drinkable possession (for example, drink and watery foods), and neutral possession, for anything not included in the three other categories. A possessive particle is required for some categories, while the word order of possessor and thing possessed is determined by whether the former is a noun or pronoun (see Parts of Speech).