Palauan language

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Palauan language

Palauan (also spelled Belauan) is one of the two nationally recognized official languages spoken in the Republic of Palau

Palau

Palau , officially the Republic of Palau , is an borderless country in the Pacific Ocean, some 500 miles east of the Philippines and 2,000 miles south of Tokyo....
(the second being English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
). It is a member of the Austronesian family of languages

Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia....
, and is considered to be one of two languages in Micronesia

Micronesia

Micronesia , from the Greek language mikros and nesos , is a subregion of Oceania, comprising hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean....
(the second being Chamorro

Chamorro language

It is an agglutinative language, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by an unlimited number of affixes. For example, masanganen?aihon "talked awhile ", passivizing prefix ma-, root verb sangan, directional suffix i "to" with excrescent consonant n, and suffix ?aihon "a short amount of time"....
) belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian

Western Malayo-Polynesian languages

The Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, also known as the Hesperonesian languages, are those Malayo-Polynesian languages which are not in the Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages branch....
group; all others are considered to be members of either the Micronesian

Micronesian languages

The family of Micronesian languages is a branch of the Central-Eastern Oceanic languages. It consists of 20 languages, the 19 Micronesian Proper languages and Nauruan language....
or Polynesian outlier

Samoic languages

The Samoic languages are one of the primary classes of Polynesian languages, encompassing the Polynesian languages of Samoa, Tuvalu, American Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, as well as a number of languages, spoken in parts of Tonga, the Cook Islands, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the Federated States o...
subgroups of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages

The family of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages is a subgroup of the Central Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages. It consists of over 500 languages....
.

phonemic

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
inventory of Palauan consists of 10 consonants and 6 vowels.

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Encyclopedia

Palauan (also spelled Belauan) is one of the two nationally recognized official languages spoken in the Republic of Palau

Palau

Palau , officially the Republic of Palau , is an borderless country in the Pacific Ocean, some 500 miles east of the Philippines and 2,000 miles south of Tokyo....
(the second being English

English language

Austronesian languages

Micronesia

Micronesia , from the Greek language mikros and nesos , is a subregion of Oceania, comprising hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean....
(the second being Chamorro

Chamorro language

Western Malayo-Polynesian languages

Micronesian languages

Samoic languages

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages

The family of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages is a subgroup of the Central Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages. It consists of over 500 languages....
.

Sounds

The phonemic

Phoneme

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception....
charts of the vowel and consonant phonemes are provided below, utilizing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

|

**Consonant Phonemes**
	Labial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless stops
Voiced stops
Voiceless fricatives
Nasals
Liquids

|}

While the phonemic inventory of Palauan is relatively small, comparatively, many phonemes contain at least two allophones

Allophone

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word....
that surface as the result of various phonological processes

Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
within the language. The full phonetic inventory of consonants is given below in IPA (the phonemic inventory of vowels, above, is complete).

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Diphthongs

Palauan contains several diphthongs (sequences of vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis....
s within a single syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech communication sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter....
). A list of diphthongs and corresponding Palauan words containing them are given below, adapted from .

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The extent to which it is accurate to characterize each of these vowel sequences as diphthongs has been a matter of debate, as in , , , . Nevertheless, a number of the sequences above, such as , 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

University of Hawaii

The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, doctoral and post-doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment training center, th...
to devise a common writing system

Writing system

A writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language....
based on the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. The resulting orthography was largely based on the "one sound/one symbol" notion of the pre-Chomskyan

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
structuralists

Structuralism

Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure....
, yielding an alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
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 passed , which mandates that educational institutions recognize the Palauan orthography laid out in and . 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.

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**Foreign consonants**
Palauan letter	IPA pronunciation(s)	Example word
f		fenda "fender (Eng.)"
h		haibio "tuberculosis (Jap. haibyoo)"
n		sensei "teacher (Jap. sensei)"
p		Papa "the Pope (Span. Papa)"
ts		tsuingam "chewing gum (Eng.)"
z		miuzium "museum (Eng.)"

**Vowels**
Palauan letter	IPA pronunciation(s)	Example word
a		chad "person"
e		sers "garden"
ee		kmeed "near"
i		sils "sun"
ii		iis "nose"
o		ngor "mouth"
oo		sekool "playful"
u		bung "flower"
uu		ngduul "mangrove clam"

Syntax

Word order

The word order

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other, and the systematic correspondences of between these arrangements....
of Palauan is usually thought to be Verb-Object-Subject (VOS)

Verb Object Subject

In linguistic typology, 'Verb Object Subject' or 'Verb Object Agent' - commonly used in its abbreviated form 'VOS' or 'VOA' - represents the language-classification type of which the following sequence of the three constituents, in neutral expressions, is an example: "Eats oranges Sam."...
, but this has been a matter of some debate in the linguistic literature. Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a pro-drop language

Pro-drop language

A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are in some sense pragmatics inference . The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is also commonly referred to in linguistics as zero or null anaphora ....
with preverbal subject

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
agreement

Agreement (linguistics)

In languages, agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when one word changes in form depending on to which other words it is being related....
morphemes

Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
, final pronominal subjects are deleted (or null

Null morpheme

In Morphology #Morpheme-based_morphology, a null morpheme is a morpheme that is realized by a phonology null affix . In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix....
).

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 for discussion.

Palauan phrases

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

Palauan	English	Palauan	English
Alii!	Hello!	Ak mlechell er a ___.	I was born in ___.
Ungil tutau.	Good morning.	Ng tela rekim?	How old are you?
Ungil sueleb.	Good afternoon.	Ng ___ a rekik.	I am ___ years old.
Ungil kebesengei.	Good evening.	Ng tela a dengua er kau?	What's your phone number?
A ngklek a ___.	My name is ___.	A dengua er ngak a ___.	My phone number is ___.
Ng techa ngklem?	What's your name?	Ke kiei er ker?	Where do you live?
Ke ua ngerang?	How are you?	Ak kiei er a ___.	I live ___.
Ak mesisiich.	I'm fine.	Chochoi.	Yes
Ak chad er a ___.	I'm from ___.	Ng diak.	No
Belau	Palau	Adang.	Please.
Merikel	U.S.A.	Sulang.	Thank you.
Ingklis	England	Ke mo er ker?	Where are you going?
Siabal	Japan	Mechikung.	Goodbye.
Sina	China	Meral ma sulang!	Thank you very much!
Ke chad er ker el beluu?	Where are you from?	Ungilbung	pretty flower.
Ke mlechell er ker el beluu?	Where were you born?

Palauan language

Sounds

Diphthongs

Writing system

Syntax

Word order

Palauan phrases

External links