The ancestors of modern Polynesians wereLapita navigators, who settled in theTonga andSamoa areas about 3,000 years ago. Linguists and archaeologists estimate that this first population went through common development during about 1000 years, giving rise toProto-Polynesian, the linguistic ancestor of all modern Polynesian languages. After that period of shared development, the Proto-Polynesian society split into several descendant populations, asPolynesian navigators scattered around various archipelagoes across the Pacific – some travellingwestwards to already populated areas, others navigating eastwards and settling in new territories (Society Islands,Marquesas,Hawaii,New Zealand,Rapa Nui, etc.).
Still today, Polynesian languages show strong similarity, particularlycognate words in their vocabulary; this includes culturally important words such astapu,ariki,motu,fenua,kava, andtapa as well as*sawaiki, the mythical homeland for some of the cultures.[2]
Polynesian languages fall into two branches,Tongic andNuclear Polynesian.Tongan andNiuean constitute the Tongic branch; all the rest are part of the Nuclear Polynesian branch.[3]
The contemporary classification of the Polynesian languages began with certain observations byAndrew Pawley in 1966 based on shared innovations in phonology, vocabulary and grammar showing that the East Polynesian languages were more closely related to Samoan than they were to Tongan, calling Tongan and its nearby relative Niuean "Tongic" and Samoan and all other Polynesian languages of the study "Nuclear Polynesian".[5]
Previously, there had been lexicostatistical studies[6][7] that squarely suggested a "West Polynesian" group composed of at least Tongan and Samoan and that an "East Polynesian" group was equally distant from both Tongan and Samoan.
Pawley published another study in 1967.[8] It began the process of extracting relationships from Polynesian languages on small islands in Melanesia, the "Polynesian Outliers", whose languages Pawley was able to trace to East Futuna in the case of those farther south and perhaps to Samoa itself in the case of those more to the north.
Except for some minor differentiation of the East Polynesian tree, further study paused for almost twenty years until Wilson[9] published a study of Polynesian pronominal systems in 1985 suggesting that there was a special relationship between the East Polynesian languages and all other Nuclear Polynesian but for Futunic, and calling that extra-Futunic group the "Ellicean languages". Furthermore, East Polynesian was found to more likely have emerged from extra-Samoan Ellicean than out of Samoa itself, in contradiction to the long assumption of a Samoan homeland for the origins of East Polynesian. Wilson named this new group "Ellicean" after the pre-independence name of Tuvalu and presented evidence for subgroups within that overarching category.
Marck,[10] in 2000, was able to offer some support for some aspects of Wilson's suggestion through comparisons of shared sporadic (irregular, unexpected) sound changes, e. g., Proto-Polynesian and Proto-Nuclear-Polynesian *mafu 'to heal' becoming Proto-Ellicean *mafo. This was made possible by the massive Polynesian language comparative lexicon ("Pollex" – with reconstructions) of Biggs and Clark.[11]
Certain regular correspondences can be noted between different Polynesian languages. For example, the Māori sounds/k/,/ɾ/,/t/, and/ŋ/ correspond to/ʔ/,/l/,/k/, and/n/ in Hawaiian. Accordingly, "man" istangata in Māori andkanaka in Hawaiian, and Māoriroa "long" corresponds to Hawaiianloa. The famous Hawaiian greetingaloha corresponds to Māoriaroha, "love, tender emotion". Similarly, the Hawaiian word forkava isʻawa.
Similarities in basic vocabulary may allow speakers from different island groups to achieve a significant degree of understanding of each other's speech. When a particular language shows unexpectedly large divergence in vocabulary, this may be the result of aname-avoidance taboo situation – see examples inTahitian, where this has happened often.
Many Polynesian languages have been greatly affected by European colonization. Both Māori and Hawaiian, for example, have lost many speakers toEnglish, and only since the 1990s have they resurged in popularity.[12][13]
In general, Polynesian languages have threenumbers for pronouns and possessives: singular,dual and plural. For example, in Māori:ia (he/she),rāua (they two),rātou (they 3 or more). The wordsrua (2) andtoru (3) are still discernible in endings of the dual and plural pronouns, giving the impression that the plural was originally atrial (threesome) orpaucal (a few), and that an original plural has disappeared.[14]Polynesian languages have four distinctions in pronouns and possessives: first exclusive, first inclusive, second and third. For example, in Māori, the plural pronouns are:mātou (we, exc),tātou (we, inc),koutou (you),rātou (they). The difference betweenexclusive and inclusive is the treatment of the person addressed.Mātou refers to the speaker and others but not the person or persons spoken to (i.e., "I and some others, but not you"), whiletātou refers to the speaker, the person or persons spoken to, and everyone else (i.e., "You and I and others").
Many Polynesian languages distinguish twopossessives. The a-possessives (as they contain that letter in most cases), also known as subjective possessives, refer to possessions that must be acquired by one's own action (alienable possession). The o-possessives or objective possessives refer to possessions that are fixed to someone, unchangeable, and do not necessitate any action on one's part but upon which actions can still be performed by others (inalienable possession). Some words can take either form, often with a difference in meaning. One example is theSamoan wordsusu, which takes the o-possessive inlona susu (her breast) and the a-possessive inlana susu (her breastmilk). Compare also the particles used in the names of two of the books of the Māori Bible:Te Pukapukaa Heremaia (The Book of Jeremiah) withTe Pukapukao Hōhua (The Book of Joshua); the former belongs to Jeremiah in the sense that he was the author, but the Book of Joshua was written by someone else about Joshua. The distinction between one's birth village and one's current residence village can be made similarly.
The words for 1,000 and 10,000 in these languages notably shifted between eastern and western branches: those in Tongic and Samoic groups usedafe for 1,000 andmano for 10,000; while Marquesic languages like Tahitian, Māori and Hawaiian usemano andtini ~kini respectively.[16]
Written Polynesian languages use orthography based onLatin script. Most Polynesian languages have fivevowel qualities, corresponding roughly to those writteni, e, a, o, u in classicalLatin. However, orthographic conventions forphonemes that are not easily encoded in standard Latin script had to develop over time. Influenced by the traditions of orthographies of languages they were familiar with, the missionaries who first developed orthographies for unwritten Polynesian languages did not explicitly mark phonemic vowel length or theglottal stop. By the time thatlinguists trained in more modern methods made their way to the Pacific, at least for the major languages, theBible was already printed according to the orthographic system developed by the missionaries, and the people had learned to read and write without marking vowel length or theglottal stop.
This situation persists in many languages. Despite efforts at reform by local academies, the general conservative resistance to orthographic change has led to varying results in Polynesian languages, and several writing variants co-exist. The most common method, however, uses amacron to indicate a long vowel, while a vowel without that diacritical mark is short, for example,ā versusa. Sometimes, a long vowel is instead written double, e.g.Maaori.
Theglottal stop (not present in all Polynesian languages, but, where present, one of the most commonconsonants) is indicated by anapostrophe, for example,'a versusa. Hawaiʻian uses theʻokina, also called byseveral other names, aunicameralconsonant letter used within theLatin script to mark thephonemicglottal stop. It is also used in many other Polynesian languages, each of which has its own name for the character. Apart from the ʻokina or the somewhat similar Tahitian ʻeta, a common method is to change the simple apostrophe for a curly one, taking a normal apostrophe for the elision and the inverted comma for theglottal stop. The latter method has come into common use in Polynesian languages.
^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017)."Polynesian languages".Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History..
^Pawley, Andrew, 1966, Polynesian languages: a subgrouping based upon shared innovations in morphology.Journal of the Polynesian Society 75(1):39–64.JSTOR20704348.
^Pawley, Andrew, 1967, The relationships of Polynesian Outlier languages.Journal of the Polynesian Society 76(3):259–296.JSTOR20704480.
^Wilson, William H., 1985, Evidence for an Outlier source for the Proto-Eastern-Polynesian pronominal system.Oceanic Linguistics 24(1/2):85-133.doi:10.2307/3623064.JSTOR3623064.
^Marck, Jeff (2000),Topics in Polynesian languages and culture history. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
^IndeedFijian, a language closely related to Polynesian, has singular, dual, paucal, and plural; and even there we may see the paucal replacing the plural in generations to come, as the paucal currently can be used for a group from 3 up to as many as 10, usually with some family, workgroup or other association.
^Overmann, Karenleigh A. (June 2021). "Counting "elevens" and why nine and two make twenty: The material roots of Polynesian numbers".Journal of Mathematics and Culture.15 (3): 5-6.
