Palauan language

Palauan
Spoken in	Palau  Guam  Northern Mariana Islands
Total speakers	about 15,000[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian (MP) Nuclear MP Central-Eastern MP ? Palauan
Writing system	Latin alphabet, katakana[2]
Official status
Official language in	Palau
Regulated by	No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	pau
ISO 639-3	pau
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Palauan (also spelled Belauan) is one of the two nationally recognized official languages spoken in the Republic of Palau (the other being English). It is a member of the Austronesian family of languages, and is considered to be one of two languages in Micronesia (the other being Chamorro) belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian group; all others are considered to be members of either the Micronesian or Polynesian outlier subgroups of Oceanic.

Classification

Palauan is not a Micronesian or Polynesian language like most of its neighbors. Rather, like Chamorro, it constitutes a possibly independent branch of the Malayo-Polynesian languages. Its origins are thus somewhat obscure. A 2008 analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database^[3] suggested at 85% confidence level that it is closest to the Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Sounds

The phonemic inventory of Palauan consists of 10 consonants and 6 vowels.^[4] Phonetic charts of the vowel and consonant phonemes are provided below, utilizing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

While the phonemic inventory of Palauan is relatively small, comparatively, many phonemes contain at least two allophones that surface as the result of various phonological processes within the language. The full phonetic inventory of consonants is given below in IPA (the phonemic inventory of vowels, above, is complete).

Diphthongs

Palauan contains several diphthongs (sequences of vowels within a single syllable). A list of diphthongs and corresponding Palauan words containing them are given below, adapted from (Zuraw 2003).

The extent to which it is accurate to characterize each of these vowel sequences as diphthongs has been a matter of debate, as in (Wilson 1972), (Flora 1974), (Josephs 1975), (Zuraw 2003). Nevertheless, a number of the sequences above, such as /ui/, clearly behave as diphthongs given their interaction with other aspects of Palauan phonology like stress shift and vowel reduction. Others do not behave as clearly like monosyllabic diphthongs.

Writing system

In the early 1970s, the Palau Orthography Committee worked with linguists from the University of Hawaii to devise a common writing system based on the Latin alphabet.^[5] The resulting orthography was largely based on the "one sound/one symbol" notion of the pre-Chomskyan structuralists, yielding an alphabet of ten native Palauan consonants (plus two double consonants), five consonants used exclusively in borrowed words, and five vowels (plus four double vowels). The 20 vowel sequences listed above under the heading Diphthongs are also all officially recognized in the orthography.

On May 10, 2007, the Palauan Senate passed Bill No. 7-79, which mandates that educational institutions recognize the Palauan orthography laid out in (Josephs 1997) and (Josephs 1999). The bill also establishes an Orthography Commission to maintain the language as it develops as well as to oversee and regulate any additions or modifications to the current official orthography.

Syntax

Word order

The word order of Palauan is usually thought to be Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), but this has been a matter of some debate in the linguistic literature.^[6] Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a pro-drop language with preverbal subject agreement morphemes, final pronominal subjects are deleted (or null).

Example 1: Ak milenga er a ringngo pro. (means: "I ate the apple.")

In the preceding example, the null pronoun pro is the subject "I," while the clause-initial ak is the first person singular subject agreement morpheme.

On the other hand, those who have analyzed Palauan as SVO necessarily reject the pro-drop analysis, instead analyzing the subject agreement morphemes as subject pronouns. In the preceding example, SVO-advocates assume that there is no pro and that the morpheme ak is simply an overt subject pronoun meaning "I." One potential problem with this analysis is that it fails to explain why overt (3rd person) subjects occur clause-finally in the presence of a co-referring 3rd person "subject pronoun" --- treating the subject pronouns as agreement morphemes circumvents this weakness. Consider the following example.

Example 2: Ng milenga er a ringngo a Olilai. (means: "Olilai ate the apple.")

Proponents of the SVO analysis must assume a shifting of the subject a Alan "Alan" from clause-initial to clause-final position, a movement operation that has not received acceptance cross-linguistically, but see (Josephs 1975) for discussion.

Palauan phrases

Some common and useful words and phrases in Palauan are listed below, with their English translations.^[7]

Notes

References

External links

• "Ethnologue report for language code:pau". Ethnologue: Languages of the World. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pau. Retrieved 5 September 2005. 
• "A Palauan Linguistic Bibliography". http://people.ucsc.edu/~jnuger/palauan_bib.html. Retrieved 9 February 2008. 
• "Airai, Palau: Language". http://www.pacificworlds.com/palau/onwards/lang8.cfm. Retrieved 12 October 2007. 
• "République de Belau" (in French). http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/pacifique/belau.htm. Retrieved 20 June 2007. 
• "PREL - Pacific Area Language Materials: Palauan". http://www.prel.org/PALM/Palauan/index.asp. Retrieved 9 February 2008. 
• "Japanese and Other Loanwords in Palauan". http://faroutliers.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/japanese-and-other-loanwords-in-palauan/. Retrieved 3 February 2008.