1036: 4P
slkdgha
8.7LanguagesofOceania.pdf
LING 1030: The Diversity of Languages
The languages of Oceania
Outline
1 Introduction
2 Austronesian languages
3 Papuanarea
4
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Australianarea
Introduction
Outline
1 Introduction
2 Austronesian languages
3 Papuanarea
4
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Australianarea
Introduction
Linguistic areas in Oceania
Oceania includes Australia and the majority of the island territories lying in the central and southern Pacific and Indian Oceans There are three major language groups in the region: Austronesian, Australian, and Papuan languages The languages of Australia have many typological similarities to each other, but no sets of sound correspondences covering all the languages have been widely accepted. Papuan is a catch-all geographical grouping for languages in the region that are not in the Austronesian family and are not spoken on the Australian mainland; the term is not meant to imply that they are all genetically related to each other
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Austronesian languages
Outline
1 Introduction
2 Austronesian languages
3 Papuanarea
4
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Australianarea
Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The name Austronesian means ‘southern’ (Latin austr-) ‘islands’ (Greek nesos): almost all the languages are spoken on islands of the south seas.
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Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The total number of speakers of languages belonging to this family approaches 400 million
It is rivaled only by Niger-Congo in the number of individual languages: the current Ethnologue counts 1,257 Austronesian languages.
Despite its impressive size, there is no doubt that the languages are genetically related to each other.
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Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
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Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDqAD2VtDQ 8/28
Austronesian languages
Formosa area
Most of the linguistic diversity within Austronesian is concentrated on the island of Taiwan, which was named Formosa ‘beautiful’ by Portuguese explorers. The original inhabitants of the island in historical times were speakers of Austronesian languages. In the seventeenth century CE, the island was colonized by the Dutch and subsequently by the Chinese. Nowadays, Taiwan is the locus of the Republic of China, and at least 98% of the population are ethnic Chinese. There is convention is to use the word Taiwanese in reference to the various Chinese languages spoken on the island, and to refer to the aboriginal Austronesian languages as Formosan.
There is no known genetic connection between the two sets of languages.
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Austronesian languages
Malayo-Polynesian
98% percent of the Austronesian languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch
This branch itself splits into two: The Western branch:
Malay (Indonesia) Tagalog (Phillipines)
The Eastern branch: Samoan (Samoa) Hawaiian (Hawaii)
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Austronesian languages
Some Austronesian correspondences
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Austronesian languages
Typology of Austronesian languages
(1) Misotro ronono izahay Malagasy (Madagaskar) drink milk we ‘We are drinking milk’
What’s the word order in Malagasy? ⇒ VOS
(2) Sa ’ai e le teine le i’a Samoan (Samoa) PAST eat ERG the girl the fish ‘The girl ate the fish’
What’s the word order in Samoan? ⇒ VSO What is its morphological type? ⇒ analytic
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⇒Austronesian languages are often verb-initial and have analytic morphology
Austronesian languages
More examples of analytic morphology: Hawaiian
Perfective aspect
(3) Ua hele ke kanaka PFV go the man ‘The man has gone’
Imperfective aspect
(4) Ia’u e noho ana me ’oukou Loc-1sg IMPF stay there with you.PL ‘While I was staying with you’
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Austronesian languages
More examples of analytic morphology: Hawaiian
Progressive aspect
(5) Ke kali nei au PROG wait I here ‘I’m waiting’
Passive voice
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(6) Ua ’ike ’ole ia ke keiki PFV see not PASS the child ‘The child was not seen’
Austronesian languages
Reduplication
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Reduplication is a common morphological process in Austronesian languages.
(7) The future tense prefix in Tagalog: reduplicated form
bili ‘buy’ kuha ‘get’ punta ‘go’ sulat ‘write’ tawa ‘laugh’
bi-bili ‘will buy’ ku-kuha ‘will get’ pu-punta ‘will go’ su-sulat ‘will write’ ta-tawa ‘will laugh’
Austronesian languages
Hawaiian pronouns: four words for "we"
Dual Plural ka-ua ka-kouInclusive
Exclusive ma-ua ma-kou
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Papuanarea
Outline
1 Introduction
2 Austronesian languages
3 Papuanarea
4
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Australianarea
Papuan area
Papuan area
The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a few spoken in the Solomon Islands, and a number in various islands of Indonesia.
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Papuan area
Papuan area
About 800 languages forming dozens of different families quite a few language isolates.
Although there have been various proposals to link these families together, most of them remain speculative.
Part of the problem is that the great majority of Papuan languages are very poorly documented
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Papuan area
Examples of Papuan languages
Note: these are just a few of the 800 Papuan languages.
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Papuan area
Papuan area: linguistic features
Papuan languages tend to be agglutinating in type.
They are mainly suffixing.
They also tend to have SOV as their basic word order.
Modifiers precede their head nouns.
They have postpositions instead of prepositions.
There has been some diffusion of linguistic features from Austronesian languages into neighboring Papuan languages, and vice versa.
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Papuan area
Papuan languages: phonology
Generally the phonology of the Papuan languages is simple compared with other language groups.
It is quite common for there to be only five vowels, and generally not many consonants.
The Papuan language Rotokas is considered to be the language with the fewest phonemes Rotokas is a language isolate spoken by about 4,320 people on the island of Bougainville, an island located to the east of New Guinea.
(8) Rotokas vowel inventory: a, e, i, o, u
(9) Rotokas consonant inventory: p, t, k, b, d, k, r
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Papuan area
Papuan languages: morphology
The morphology of nouns is usually simple, but the verb morphology may be complex
In Kiwai (southern Papua New Guinea), various prefixes and suffixes indicate subtle differences of tense, mood, aspect and the number of agents or objects (10).
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(10) a. asidim-ai ‘cover one object once’ b. asidim-o ‘keep covering one object’ c. i-asidim-ai ‘cover more than one object once’ d. i-asidim-uti ‘cover more than one object in separate actions’
Australianarea
Outline
1 Introduction
2 Austronesian languages
3 Papuanarea
4
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Australianarea
Australian area
Australian area
Australia is an overwhelmingly English-speaking country, with substantial minorities speaking such languages as Chinese, Italian, Arabic, and Greek.
All these are European and Asian languages, introduced into Australia in or after 1788.
Prior to European colonization, Australia was host to hundreds of Aboriginal languages. Many of them still exist, but the vast majority are dead or near extinction.
Examples languages include Dyirbal (Queensland, about 29 speakers) and Warlpiri (Northern Territory, about 3000 speakers).
Australian languages cannot be grouped into a single family, but typologically they are very similar.
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Australian area
Basic grammatical properties
The sound systems are very uniform.
There is an almost total absence of fricatives and affricates, a feature that is unusual outside of Oceania.
In the vast majority of Australian languages, voicing is not lexically contrastive. They do have voiced and voiceless stops, such as [t] and [d], but these are almost always allophones of the same phoneme. Agglutinating morphology with suffixes ergative case system
Basic word order: SOV (word order is relatively free)
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Australian area
Dyirbal noun classes
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Class Absolutive Ergative Dative Genitive
Class I (Male) bayi banggul bagul bangul
Class II (Female) balan banggun banggun bangun
Class III (Edible) balam banggum bagum —
Class IV (Inanimate) bala banggu bagu bangu
Australian area
Dyirbal Case
(11)
Case is reflected both on the class marker and the noun Basic word order can be altered. What kind of noun are marked with Ergative case?
banggul yara-nggu balan dyugumbil balagan Cl.I-ERG man-ERG CL.II woman hit ‘The man hit the woman’
(12) balan dyugumbil banggul yara-nggu balagan CL.II woman Cl.I-ERG man-ERG hit ‘The man hit the woman’
(13) bayi yara baninyu Cl.I man came ‘The man came’
Ergative case: on subjects of transitive sentences 28/28
