Oceanic languages

Oceanic languages
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Oceanic_languages".

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Oceanic
Geographic distribution:	Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia
Genetic classification:	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian (MP) Nuclear MP Central-Eastern MP Eastern MP Oceanic
Subdivisions:	St Matthias Yapese Admiralties Family Western Oceanic Linkage Temotu Central-Eastern Oceanic
The branches of Oceanic Orange = Admiralties and Yapese Yellow-orange = St. Matthias Green = Western Oceanic Violet = Temotu The rest are Central-Eastern: Dark red = Southeast Solomons Blue = Southern Oceanic Pink = Micronesian Ocher = Fijian-Polynesian (not shown: Rapa Nui) The black ovals at the northwestern limit of Micronesian are the Sunda-Sulawesi languages Palauan and Chamorro. The black circles in with the green are offshore Papuan languages.

The Oceanic languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, containing approximately 450 languages. The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia.

Despite covering such a vast area, Oceanic languages are spoken by less than two million people. The largest individual Oceanic languages are Samoan and Eastern Fijian, with over 300,000 speakers. Kiribati (Gilbertese), Tongan, and perhaps Kuanua (Tolai) have 100,000 speakers apiece.

The common ancestor which is reconstructed for this group of languages is called Proto Oceanic (abbr. POc). The Oceanic languages were first shown to be a language family by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1896.

Classification

St Matthias
Yapese ^[1]
Admiralties
- Western Admiralties
- Eastern Admiralties
Western Oceanic linkage (languages of the north coast of New Guinea, from Jayapura to the Solomon Islands)
- Sarmi-Jayapura Bay
- North New Guinea cluster
- Papuan Tip cluster
- Meso-Melanesian cluster (languages of the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands)
Temotu ^[2]
- Reef Islands-Santa Cruz ^[3]
- Utupua-Vanikoro ^[4]
Central-Eastern Oceanic (languages of the open Pacific)
- Southeast Solomons
- Southern Oceanic linkage (languages of New Caledonia and Vanuatu)
- Central Pacific linkage (Polynesian and the languages of Fiji)
- Micronesian

Notes

^ Yapese may in fact be an Admiralty Islands language.
^ This subgroup was identified by Ross and Næss (2007). Note that its internal structure is still tentative.
^ These were previously argued to be Papuan (that is, non-Austronesian) languages.
^ This group may in fact be two branches, Utupua and Vanikoro; Utupua-Vanikoro was previously classified with Central-Eastern Oceanic.

References

Ray, S.H. (1896). "The common origin of the Oceanic languages". Journal of the Polynesian Society: 58–68.
Lynch, John; Malcolm Ross; Terry Crowley (2002). The Oceanic languages. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. ISBN 9780700711284. OCLC 48929366.
Ross, Malcolm and Åshild Næss (2007). "An Oceanic Origin for Äiwoo, the Language of the Reef Islands?". Oceanic Linguistics 46: 456–498.

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