| Oceanic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Oceania |
| Linguistic classification | Austronesian |
| Proto-language | Proto-Oceanic |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | ocea1241 |
 The branches of Oceanic (The bottom four could be grouped under one branch, -Central–Eastern Oceanic)Theblack ovals at the northwestern limit of Micronesia are the non-OceanicMalayo-Polynesian languagesPalauan andChamorro. Theblack circles inside the green circles are offshorePapuan languages. | |
The approximately 450Oceanic languages are a branch of theAustronesian languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includesPolynesia, as well as much ofMelanesia andMicronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages are spoken by only two million people. The largest individual Oceanic languages areEastern Fijian with over 600,000 speakers, andSamoan with an estimated 400,000 speakers. TheGilbertese (Kiribati),Tongan,Tahitian,Māori andTolai (Gazelle Peninsula) languages each have over 100,000 speakers. Thecommon ancestor which is reconstructed for this group of languages is calledProto-Oceanic (abbr. "POc").
The Oceanic languages were first shown to be alanguage family bySidney Herbert Ray in 1896 and, besidesMalayo-Polynesian, they are the only established large branch ofAustronesian languages. Grammatically, they have been strongly influenced by thePapuan languages of northernNew Guinea, but they retain a remarkably large amount of Austronesian vocabulary.[1]
According toJohn Lynch,Malcolm Ross, andTerry Crowley's 2002 bookThe Oceanic Languages, Oceanic languages often formlinkages with each other. Linkages are formed when languages emerged historically from an earlierdialect continuum. The linguistic innovations shared by adjacent languages define a chain of intersecting subgroups (alinkage), for which no distinctproto-language can be reconstructed.[2]
Lynch, Ross, & Crowley (2002) propose three primary groups of Oceanic languages:
The "residues" (as they are called by Lynch, Ross, & Crowley), which do not fit into the three groups above, but are still classified as Oceanic are:
Ross & Næss (2007) removed Utupua–Vanikoro, from Central–Eastern Oceanic, to a new primary branch of Oceanic:[3]
Blench (2014)[4] considers Utupua and Vanikoro to be two separate branches that are both non-Austronesian.
Ross, Pawley, & Osmond (2016) propose the following revised rake-like classification of Oceanic, with 9 primary branches.[5]: 10
Roger Blench (2014)[4] argues that many languages conventionally classified as Oceanic are in fact non-Austronesian (or "Papuan", which is a geographic rather than genetic grouping), includingUtupua andVanikoro. Blench doubts that Utupua and Vanikoro are closely related, and thus should not be grouped together. Since each of the three Utupua and three Vanikoro languages are highly distinct from each other, Blench doubts that these languages had diversified on the islands of Utupua and Vanikoro, but had rather migrated to the islands from elsewhere. According to him, historically this was due to theLapita demographic expansion consisting of both Austronesian and non-Austronesian settlers migrating from the Lapita homeland in theBismarck Archipelago to various islands further to the east.
Other languages traditionally classified as Oceanic that Blench (2014) suspects are in fact non-Austronesian include theKaulong language ofWest New Britain, which has aProto-Malayo-Polynesian vocabulary retention rate of only 5%, andlanguages of the Loyalty Islands that are spoken just to the north ofNew Caledonia.
Blench (2014) proposes that languages classified as:
Word order in Oceanic languages is highly diverse, and is distributed in the following geographic regions (Lynch, Ross, & Crowley 2002:49).
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