Polynesian languages in the context of "Polynesian triangle"

Native languages of Oceania fall into three major geographic groups:

• The large Austronesian language family, with such languages as Malay (Indonesian), Tagalog (Filipino), and Polynesian languages such as Māori and Hawaiian
• The various Aboriginal Australian language families, including the large Pama–Nyungan family
• The various Papuan language families of New Guinea and neighbouring islands, including the large Trans–New Guinea family

Contact between Austronesian and Papuan resulted in several instances in mixed languages such as Maisin.

Polynesia (UK: /ˌpɒlɪˈniːziə/ POL-in-EE-zee-ə, US: /-ˈniːʒə/ -⁠EE-zhə) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including linguistic relations, cultural practices, and traditional beliefs.

The term Polynésie was first used in 1756 by the French writer Charles de Brosses, who originally applied it to all the islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a narrower definition during a lecture at the Société de Géographie of Paris. By tradition, the islands located in the southern Pacific have also often been called the South Sea Islands, and their inhabitants have been called South Sea Islanders. The Hawaiian Islands have often been considered to be part of the South Sea Islands because of their relative proximity to the southern Pacific islands, even though they are in fact located in the North Pacific. Another term in use, which avoids this inconsistency, is "the Polynesian Triangle" (from the shape created by the layout of the islands in the Pacific Ocean). This term makes clear that the grouping includes the Hawaiian Islands, which are located at the northern vertex of the referenced "triangle".

Polynesians are an ethnolinguistic group comprising closely related ethnic groups native to Polynesia, which encompasses the islands within the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean. They trace their early prehistoric origins to Island Southeast Asia and are part of the larger Austronesian ethnolinguistic group, with an Urheimat in Taiwan. They speak the Polynesian languages, a branch of the Oceanic subfamily within the Austronesian language family. The Indigenous Māori people form the largest Polynesian population, followed by Samoans, Native Hawaiians, Tahitians, Tongans, and Cook Islands Māori.

As of 2012, there were an estimated 2 million ethnic Polynesians (both full and part) worldwide. The vast majority either inhabit independent Polynesian nation-states (Samoa, Niue, Cook Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu) or form minorities in countries such as Australia, Chile (Easter Island), New Zealand, France (French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna), and the United States (Hawaii and American Samoa), as well as in the British Overseas Territory of the Pitcairn Islands. New Zealand had the highest population of Polynesians, estimated at 110,000 in the 18th century.

Guam (/ˈɡwɑːm/ GWAHM; Chamorro: Guåhan [ˈɡʷɑhɑn]) is an island that is an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States in the Micronesia subregion of the western Pacific Ocean. Guam's capital is Hagåtña, and the most populous village is Dededo. It is the westernmost point and territory of the United States, as measured from the geographic center of the U.S. In Oceania, Guam is the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands and the largest island in Micronesia. In 2022, its population was 168,801. Chamorros are its largest ethnic group, but a minority on the multiethnic island. The territory spans 210 square miles (540 km; 130,000 acres) and has a population density of 775 per square mile (299/km).

Indigenous Guamanians are the Chamorro, who are related to the Austronesian peoples of the Malay Archipelago, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Polynesia. Unlike most of its neighbors, the Chamorro language is not classified as a Micronesian or Polynesian language. Like Palauan, it possibly constitutes an independent branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. The Chamorro people settled Guam and the Mariana islands approximately 3,500 years ago. Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, while in the service of Spain, was the first European to visit and claim the island in March 1521. Guam was fully colonized by Spain in 1668. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Guam was an important stopover for Spanish Manila galleons. During the Spanish–American War, the United States captured Guam in June 1898. Under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded Guam to the U.S. effective April 11, 1899.

Tahitian (autonym: reo Tahiti, pronounced [ˈreo tahiti], part of reo Māʼohi, [ˈreo ˈmaːʔohi], languages of French Polynesia) is a Polynesian language, spoken mainly on the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It belongs to the Eastern Polynesian group.

As Tahitian had no written tradition before the arrival of the Western colonists, the spoken language was first transcribed by missionaries of the London Missionary Society in the early 19th century.

A voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek ἆγμα âgma 'fragment'), is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ng in English sing as well as n before velar consonants as in English and ink. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩. The IPA symbol ⟨ŋ⟩ is similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to ⟨ɲ⟩, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem.

While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/ as phonemes, /ŋ/ is rarer. Half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson (2008) had a velar nasal phoneme; as a further curiosity, many of them limit its occurrence to the syllable coda. The velar nasal does not occur in many of the languages of the Americas, the Middle East, or the Caucasus, but it is extremely common among Australian Aboriginal languages, languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, and Polynesian languages. In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, such as most of the Romance languages, it occurs as an allophone of /n/ before velar consonants. This kind of assimilation can even be found in languages with phonemic voiced velar nasals, such as English. An example of this phenomenon is the word income; its underlying representation, /ˈɪnˌkʌm/, can be realized as either [ˈɪnˌkʌm] or [ˈɪŋˌkʌm].

Temotu (or Te Motu, literally "the island" in Polynesian) is the easternmost province of Solomon Islands. The province was formerly known as Santa Cruz Islands Province. It consists, essentially, of two chains of islands which run parallel to each other from the northwest to the southeast. Its area is 895 square kilometres (346 square miles).

Bougainville (/ˈboʊɡənvɪl/ BOH-gən-vil; Tok Pisin: Bogenvil), officially the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (Tok Pisin: Otonomos Region bilong Bogenvil), is an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea. The largest island is Bougainville Island, while the region also includes Buka Island and a number of outlying islands and atolls. The provisional capital is Buka, on Buka Island.

In 2024, the region had an population of 367,093. The lingua franca of Bougainville is Tok Pisin, while a variety of Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages are also spoken. The region includes several Polynesian outliers where Polynesian languages are spoken. Geographically, the islands of Bougainville and Buka form part of the Solomon Islands archipelago, but they are politically separate from the independent country of Solomon Islands. Historically, Bougainville and Buka, together with the islands of Choiseul, Santa Isabel, the Shortlands, and Ontong Java, which are all now part of the country of Solomon Islands, formed the German Solomon Islands Protectorate, the geographical area later being referred to as the North Solomon Islands.

Samoan (Gagana faʻa Sāmoa or Gagana Sāmoa, pronounced [ŋaˈŋana ˈfaʔa ˈsaːmʊa]) is a Polynesian language spoken by Samoans of the Samoan Islands. Administratively, the islands are split between the sovereign country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa. It is an official language, alongside English, in both jurisdictions. It is widely spoken across the Pacific region, heavily so in New Zealand and in Australia and the United States. Among the Polynesian languages, Samoan is the most widely spoken by a number of native speakers.

Samoan is spoken by approximately 260,000 people in the archipelago and with many Samoans living in diaspora in a number of countries, the total number of speakers worldwide was estimated at 510,000 in 2015. It is the third-most widely spoken language in New Zealand, where 2.2% of the population, 101,900 people, were able to speak it as of 2018.