POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES

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Note: Since some languages on the list do not have native recordings I used my own voice to record. It may not be 100% accurate.

The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family.

There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austronesian family. While half of them are spoken in geographical Polynesia (the Polynesian triangle), the other half – known as Polynesian outliers – is spoken in other parts of the Pacific: from Micronesia to atolls scattered in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. The most prominent Polynesian languages, in the number of speakers, are Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan, Māori, and Hawaiian.

The ancestors of modern Polynesians were Lapita navigators, who settled in the Tonga and Samoa areas about 3,000 years ago.

The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their material culture, who settled in Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration from around 1600 to 500 BCE. They are believed to have originated from the northern Philippines, either directly, via the Mariana Islands, or both.

Linguists and archaeologists estimate that this first population went through common development during about 1000 years, giving rise to Proto-Polynesian, the linguistic ancestor of all modern Polynesian languages. After that period of shared development, the Proto-Polynesian society split into several descendant populations, as Polynesian navigators scattered around various archipelagoes across the Pacific – some traveling westwards to already populated areas, others navigating eastwards and settling in new territories (Society Islands, Marquesas, Hawaii, New Zealand, Rapa Nui, etc.).

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