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Chamorro is a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language, spoken on the Mariana Islands

Mariana Islands

The Mariana Islands are an arc-shaped archipelago made up by the summits of 15 volcanic mountains in the north-western Pacific Ocean between the 12th and 21st parallels north and along the 145th meridian east...

(Guam

Guam

Guam is an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States located in the western Pacific Ocean. It is one of five U.S. territories with an established civilian government. Guam is listed as one of 16 Non-Self-Governing Territories by the Special Committee on Decolonization of the United...

, Rota

Rota (island)

Rota also known as the "peaceful island", is the southernmost island of the United States Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the second southernmost of the Marianas Archipelago. It lies approximately 40 miles north-northeast of the United States territory of Guam...

, Tinian

Tinian

Tinian is one of the three principal islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.-Geography:Tinian is about 5 miles southwest of its sister island, Saipan, from which it is separated by the Saipan Channel. It has a land area of 39 sq.mi....

, and Saipan

Saipan

Saipan is the largest island of the United States Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands , a chain of 15 tropical islands belonging to the Marianas archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean with a total area of . The 2000 census population was 62,392...

) by about 47,000 people (about 35,000 people on Guam and about 12,000 in the N. Marianas).

Speakers

The numbers of Chamorro speakers have declined in recent years, and the younger generations are less likely to know the language. The influence of English has caused the language to become endangered. On Guam (called "Guåhan" by Chamorro speakers, from the word guaha, meaning "have", but its English meaning is, "We Have", from the idea that they had everything they needed,) the number of native Chamorro speakers has dwindled in the last decade or so, while in the Northern Mariana Islands, young Chamorros still speak the language fluently. Various representatives from Guam have unsuccessfully lobbied the United States to take action to promote and protect the language.

It is still common among Chamorro households in the Northern Marianas, but fluency has greatly decreased among Guamanian Chamorros during the years of American rule in favor of American English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, which is commonplace throughout the inhabited Marianas.

Classification

Unlike most of its neighbors, Chamorro is not a Micronesian

Micronesian languages

The family of Micronesian languages is a branch of the Oceanic languages. It consists of twenty languages, the nineteen Micronesian Proper languages and Nauruan...

or Polynesian

Polynesian languages

The Polynesian languages are a language family spoken in the region known as Polynesia. They are classified as part of the Austronesian family, belonging to the Oceanic branch of that family. They fall into two branches: Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian. Polynesians share many cultural traits...

language. Rather, like Palauan

Palauan language

Palauan is one of the two nationally recognized official languages spoken in the Republic of Palau...

, it constitutes a possibly independent branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language family

Malayo-Polynesian languages

The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. These are widely dispersed throughout the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia...

. Its indigenous origins are thus somewhat obscure. A 2008 analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database suggested an 85% confidence level that it is closest to the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Chamorro also has much Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

influence, due to three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Many Chamorro nouns, adjectives, prepositions, numerals, and verbs are of Spanish origin. Under a historical point of view, it may be considered a mixed language, even if it is now independent and unique. When Guam was colonised by the United States, Chamorro was at the pre-stage of being transformed into a Spanish-based creole, and the transfer of rule made it so that it never reached that point.

Orthography

Letter	pronunciation
’	[ʔ] (glottal stop Glottal stop The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of... )
A A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...	[æ]
Å Å Å represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...	[ɑ]
B B B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:...	[b]
Ch Ch (digraph) Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet and Uyghur. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no...	[ts]
D D D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the...	[d]
E E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...	[e]
F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club...	[f]
G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...	[ɡ]
Gu	[ɡʷ]
H H H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....	[h]
I I I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...	[i]
K K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA....	[k]
L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...	[l]
M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water...	[m]
N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet...	[n]
Ñ Ñ Ñ is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is used in the Spanish alphabet, Galician alphabet, Asturian alphabet, Basque alphabet, Aragonese old alphabet , Filipino alphabet, Chamorro alphabet and the Guarani alphabet, where it represents...	[ɲ]
Ng	[ŋ]
O O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...	[o]
P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words...	[p]
R R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R...	[ɾ]
S S S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...	[s]
T T T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets...	[t]
U U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....	[u]
Y Y Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound...	[dz]

Note that the letter Y is pronounced more like 'dz' (an approximation of the regional Spanish

Spanish language

pronunciation of "Y"/"LL" as [dʒ]); nor are N and Ñ always distinguished. Thus the Guamanian place name spelled Yona
Yona, Guam
- History :The village was historically a farming community but today is mostly residential. During World War II, the Japanese forced the indigenous Chamorros to march from camps in northern Guam to prison camps in the Manenggon area in Yona shortly before the Americans liberated the island...

is pronounced 'dzo-nia' [dzo.ɲa], not 'yo-na' [jo.na] as might be expected. Note also that Ch is usually pronounced like 'ts' rather than 'tsh' and that A and Å are not always distinguished in written Chamorro (often being written simply as 'A'). R in Chamorro is pronounced like [ɾ] like Spanish in between vowels; and as a retroflex approximant at the beginning of words [ɻ].

Chamorro has geminate consonants which are written double (GG, DD, KK, MM, NGNG, PP, SS, TT), native diphthong

Diphthong

A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...

s AI and AO, plus OI, OE, IA, IU, IE in loanwords; penultimate stress, except where marked otherwise with an acute accent

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

, as in asút "blue" or dángkulo "big". Unstressed vowels are limited to /ə i u/, though they are often spelled A E O. Syllables may be consonant-vowel-consonant, as in che’lu "sibling", diskatga "unload", mamahlao "shy", or oppop "lie face down", gatus (old word for 100), Hagåtña (Capital of Guam); B, D, and G are not distinguished from P, T, and K in that position.

Chamorro grammar

Chamorro is an agglutinative language

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by a number of affixes. For example, masanganenñaihon "talked awhile (with/to)", passive marking prefix ma-, root verb sangan, referential suffix i "to" (forced morphophonemically to change to e) with excrescent consonant n, and suffix ñaihon "a short amount of time". Thus Masanganenñaihon gue' "He/she was told (something) for a while".

Chamorro has many Spanish

Spanish language

loanword

Loanword

A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

s and other words have Spanish etymological roots (e.g. tenda "shop/store" from Spanish tienda), which may lead some to mistakenly conclude that the language is a Spanish Creole

Spanish-based Creole languages

-Chavacano:Chavacano is a Spanish-based Creole language and the name of the Six Dialects of Spanish evolved words turned into a Creole language spoken in the Philippines...

: Chamorro very much uses its loan words in a Micronesian way (e.g.: bumobola "playing ball

Ball

A ball is a round, usually spherical but sometimes ovoid, object with various uses. It is used in ball games, where the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked or thrown by players. Balls can also be used for simpler activities, such as catch, marbles and juggling...

" from bola "ball, play ball" with verbalizing infix

Infix

An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the end of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.-Indonesian:...

-um- and reduplication

Reduplication

Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....

of first syllable of root).

Chamorro is predicate

Predicate (grammar)

There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...

-initial, head-marking language. It has a rich agreement system both in the nominal and in the verbal domains. The following table gives the possessor-noun agreement suffixes:

Person/Number	Suffix
1 sg	-hu / -ku
2 sg	-mu
3 sg	-ña
1 incl du/pl	-ta
1 excl du/pl	-(n)mami
2 du/pl	-(n)miyu
3 du/pl	-(n)ñiha

Chamorro is also known for its wh-agreement in the verb: these agreement morphemes agree with features (roughly, the Grammatical case

Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...

feature) of the question phrase, and replace the regular subject–verb agreement:

(1)	Ha-fa'gasi	si	Juan	i	kareta.
	3sSA-wash	PND	Juan	the	car

'Juan washed the car.'

(2)	Hayi	fuma'gasi	i	kareta?
	who?	WH[nom]. wash	the	car

'Who washed the car?'

Chamorro basic phrases

Håfa Adai	Hello. [informal]
Memorias [Spanish introduced]	Greetings
Kao mamaolek ha' hao?	How are you? [lit.: Are you doing well?][informal]
Håfa tatatmånu hao?	How are you?[formal]
Håyi nå'ån-mu?	What is your name?
Nå'ån-hu si Chris	My name is Chris.
Ñålang yo'	I'm hungry.
Må'o yo'	I'm thirsty.

Ådios [Spanish introduced]	Good bye.
Put Fabot [Spanish introduced]	please
Fanatåtte[Indigenous]	Good bye (lit.: And so you will follow.)
Buenas dias [Spanish introduced]	Good morning.
Buenas tåtdes [Spanish introduced]	Good afternoon.
Buenas noches [Spanish introduced]	Good night.

Esta ågupa'	Until tomorrow
Si Yu'us ma'åse'	Thank you (lit: God have mercy)
Buen probecho [Spanish introduced]	"You're Welcome"

Numbers

Current common Chamorro uses only number words of Spanish origin: unu, dos, tres, etc. Old Chamorro used different number words based on categories: "Basic numbers" (for date, time, etc.), "living things", "inanimate things", and "long objects".

English English language English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...	Modern Chamorro	Old Chamorro: Basic Numbers	Old Chamorro: Living Things	Old Chamorro: Inanimate Things	Old Chamorro: Long Objects
one	unu/una (time)	hacha	maisa	hachiyai	takhachun
two	dos	hugua	hugua	hugiyai	takhuguan
three	tres	tulu	tato	to'giyai	taktulun
four	kuåttro'	fatfat	fatfat	fatfatai	takfatun
five	singko'	lima	lalima	limiyai	takliman
six	sais	gunum	guagunum	gonmiyai	ta'gunum
seven	sietti	fiti	fafiti	fitgiyai	takfitun
eight	ocho'	gualu	guagualu	guatgiyai	ta'gualun
nine	nuebi	sigua	sasigua	sigiyai	taksiguan
ten	dies	manot	maonot	manutai	takmaonton
hundred	siento	gatus	gatus	gatus	gatus/manapo

The number 10 and its multiples up to 90 are: dies(10), benti(20), trenta(30), kuårenta(40), sinkuenta(50), sisenta(60), sitenta(70), ochenta(80), nubenta(90)
Similar to Spanish terms: diez(10), veinte(20), treinta(30), cuarenta(40), cincuenta(50), sesenta(60), setenta(70), ochenta(80), noventa(90).

Chamorro Studies

Chamorro language is studied at the University of Guam

University of Guam

University of Guam is a four-year land-grant institution, located in the village of Mangilao on the island of Guam in the Western Pacific Ocean...

and in several academic institutions of Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Researches in several countries are also studying different aspects of Chamorro. In 2009, the Chamorro Linguistics International Network (CHIN) http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/chin/ was established in Bremen, Germany. CHiN was founded on occasion of the Chamorro Day (27 September 2009) which was part of the programme of the Festival of Languages http://www.festival.uni-bremen.de. The foundation ceremony was attended by people from Germany, Guam, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States of America.

External links

Chamorro-English Online Dictionary
http://ns.gov.gu/language.html
http://www.offisland.com/thelanguage.html
http://www.chamorro.com/fino/fino.html
Chamorro-English dictionary, partially available at Google Books.
A Chamorro Reference Grammar, partially available at Google Books.
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Chamorro-english/
Chamorro Wordlist at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database
http://www.sous-le-soleil-de-guam.com
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/chin/ Chamorro Linguistics International Network (CHIN).

Chamorro language

Speakers

Classification

Orthography

Chamorro grammar

Chamorro basic phrases

Numbers

Chamorro Studies

See also

General references

External links