Palauan language

Palauan
a tekoi er a Belau
Native to	Palau, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands
Native speakers	17,000 (2008)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Palauan
Writing system	Latin (formerly katakana)[2]
Official status
Official language in	Palau
Regulated by	Palau Language Commission
Language codes
ISO 639-2	pau
ISO 639-3	pau
Glottolog	pala1344
Linguasphere	31-PAA-aa
Palauan
Coordinates: 7.34°N 134.48°E / 7.34; 134.48

Palauan (a tekoi er a Belau^[3]) is a Malayo-Polynesian language native to the Republic of Palau, where it is one of the two official languages, alongside English. It is widely used in day-to-day life in the country. Palauan is not closely related to other Malayo-Polynesian languages and its exact classification within the branch is unclear.

Classification

It is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages, and is one of only two indigenous languages in Micronesia that are not part of the Oceanic sub-branch of that family, the other being Chamorro (see Dempwolff 1934, Blust 1977, Jackson 1986, and Zobel 2002).

Roger Blench (2015)^[4] argues that based on evidence from fish names, Palauan had early contact with Oceanic languages either directly or indirectly via the Yapese language. These include fish names for the sea eel, yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), left-eye flounder (Bothus mancus), triggerfish, sailfish, barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda), damsel fish (Abudefduf sp.), squirrelfish (Holocentrus spp.), unicorn fish (Naso spp.), trevally, land crab (Cardisoma rotundus), and wrasse. This suggests that Oceanic speakers had influenced the fishing culture of Palau, and had been fishing and trading in the vicinity of Palau for quite some time. Blench (2015) also suggests that the Palauan language displays influence from Central Philippine languages and Samalic languages.

Phonology

The phonemic inventory of Palauan consists of 10 consonants and 6 vowels.^[5] Phonetic charts of the vowel and consonant phonemes are provided below, utilizing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Vowel phonemes   Front Central Back High i   u Mid ɛ ə o Low   a

Consonant phonemes Bilabial Alveolar Velar Glottal Nasal m ŋ Stop b t d k ʔ Fricative s Lateral l Flap ɾ

Allophones

While the phonemic inventory of Palauan is relatively small, comparatively, many phonemes contain at least two allophones that surface as the result of various phonological processes within the language. The full phonetic inventory of consonants is given below in IPA (the phonemic inventory of vowels, above, is complete).

Consonant allophones Bilabial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal m n ŋ Stop p pʰ b   t tʰ d   k kʰ ɡ   ʔ   Fricative θ ð s Approximant (Lateral) j w l Flap ɾ Trill r

The following is the table of allophones and their contexts in Palauan.^[6]

Phoneme	Allophone	Context
/b/	[p]	Word final, e.g. tub [tʰup] "spit" Before another consonant, e.g. brer [prɛr]
/d/	[ð]	Word initially (in careful speech), e.g. dub [ðup] "dynamite"

Diphthongs

Palauan contains several diphthongs (sequences of vowels within a single syllable). A list of diphthongs and corresponding Palauan words containing them are given below, adapted from Zuraw (2003).

Diphthongs IPA Example English Translation /iɛ/ babier "paper" (German loan) /iu/ chiukl "(singing) voice" /io/ kikiongel "dirty" /ia/ diall "ship" /ɛi/ mei "come" /ɛu/ teu' "width" /ɛo/ Oreor "Koror" (former capital of Palau) /ɛa/ beached "tin" /ui/ tuich "torch" /uɛ/ sueleb "afternoon" /uo/ uos "horse" (English loan) /ua/ tuangel "door" /oi/ tekoi "word" /oɛ/ beroel "spear" /ou/ merous "distribute" /oa/ omoachel "river" /ai/ chais "news" /aɛ/ baeb "pipe" (English loan) /au/ mesaul "tired" /ao/ taod "fork"

The extent to which it is accurate to characterize each of these vowel sequences as diphthongs has been a matter of debate, as in Wilson 1972, Flora 1974, Josephs 1975, and Zuraw 2003. Nevertheless, a number of the sequences above, such as /ui/, 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 to devise an alphabet based on the Latin script.^[7] The resulting orthography was largely based on the "one phoneme/one symbol" notion, producing an alphabet of twelve native consonants, six consonants for use in loan words, and ten vowels. The 20 vowel sequences listed under Diphthongs are also all officially recognized in the orthography.

Most of the letters/graphemes in written Palauan correspond to phonemes that can be represented by the corresponding segments in the International Phonetic Alphabet (Nuger 2016:308), e.g., Palauan b is the phoneme /b/. Three notable exceptions are worth mentioning. The first is ch, which is invariably pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ]. The ch digraph is a remnant of an earlier writing system developed during German occupation when the glottal stop was pronounced as a fricative [x]. Some older Palauans still remember their grandparents pronouncing ch this way. In modern Palauan usage the sound [x] has been completely replaced by [ʔ], but the ch spelling persists. The second is e, which represents either the full vowel [ɛ], or a schwa [ə] which is restricted to unstressed syllables; the conditions are similar to those of English vowel reduction. The third is the digraph ng, which is a (phonemic) velar nasal /ŋ/ but can assimilate to be pronounced as [m] or [n]. There is no phonemic /n/ in Palauan. This gap is due to a historical sound shift from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *n to /l/.^[8]

On May 10, 2007, the Senate of Palau passed Bill No. 7-79, which mandates that educational institutions recognize the Palauan orthography laid out in Josephs 1997 and Josephs 1999. 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.

Native consonants Palauan grapheme IPA Example word b [b], [p], [bʱ], [pʰ] bai 'community house' ch [ʔ] charm 'animal' d [d], [t], [ð], [θ] diall 'ship' k [k], [ɡ], [kʰ], [ɡʱ] ker 'question' l [l] lius 'coconut' ll [lː] llel 'leaf' m [m] martiliong 'hammer' (Span. Martillo) ng [ŋ], [n] ngau 'fire' r [ɾ] rekas 'mosquito' rr [r] rrom 'liquor' s [s] sechelei 'friend' t [t], [tʰ] tuu 'banana'

Foreign consonants Palauan grapheme IPA Example word f [f] fenda 'fender' (Eng.) h [h] haibio 'tuberculosis' (Jpn. haibyoo 肺病) n [n] sensei 'teacher' (Jpn. sensei 先生)" p [p] Papa 'the Pope' (Span. Papa) ts [ts] tsuingam 'chewing gum' (Eng.) z [z] miuzium 'museum' (Eng.)

Vowels Palauan grapheme IPA Example word a [a] chad 'person' e [ɛ] sers 'garden' e [ə] ngalek 'child' ee [ɛː] kmeed 'near' i [i] sils 'sun' ii [iː], [ji], [ij] iis 'nose' o [o] ngor 'mouth' oo [oː] sekool 'playful' u [u] bung 'flower' uu [uː], [wu], [uw] ngduul 'mangrove clam'

Grammar

Pronouns

The following set of pronouns are the pronouns found in the Palauan language:^[9][10]

	Free	NOM I	NOM II	OBJ	POSS
1st person singular	ngak	ak	k-	-ak	-k
2nd person singular	kau	kə	chom-	-au	-m
3rd person singular	ngii	ng	l-	-ii	-l
1st person plural inclusive	kid	kədə	d-	-id	-d
1st person plural exclusive	kəmam	aki	-kim	-əmam	-(m)am
2nd person plural	kəmiu	kom	chom-	-əmiu	-(m)iu
3rd person plural	tir	tə	-l	-tərir	-rir

Noun inflection

Palauan nouns inflect based on humanness and number via the plural prefix re-, which attaches to plural human nouns (see Josephs 1975:43). For example, the word chad 'person' is a human noun that is unambiguously singular, whereas the noun rechad people is a human noun that is unambiguously plural. Non-human nouns do not display this distinction, e.g., the word for 'stone', bad, can denote either a singular 'stone' or multiple 'stones.'^[11]

Some possessed nouns in Palauan also inflect to agree with the person, number, and humanness of their possessors. For example, the unpossessed noun tebel means simply 'table,' whereas one of its possessed forms tebelek means 'my table.' Possessor agreement is always registered via the addition of a suffix to the noun (also triggering a shift in stress to the suffix). The possessor agreement suffixes have many different irregular forms that only attach to particular nouns, and they must be memorized on a noun-by-noun basis (Josephs 1997:96). However, there is a "default" e-set suffixes (see Josephs 1997:93 and Nuger 2016:28), shown below:

E-set

		Singular	Plural
			Inclusive	Exclusive
1st person		-ek	-ed	-am
2nd person		-em	-iu
3rd person	human	-el	-ir
	nonhuman	-el

U-set, I-set, and A-set

		Singular	Plural
			Inclusive	Exclusive
1st person		-Vk	-Vd	-(e)mam
2nd person		-Vm	-(e)miu
3rd person	human	-Vl	-(e)rir
	nonhuman	-Vl
Note that -V- represents vowels -u-, -i-, or -a-.

There are some morphophonological changes, often unpredictable, including: (Josephs 1997)

• Single vowels are reduced to /ə/, written as e (bad → bed·uk 'my stone'), or being syncopated entirely (ngikel → ngkel·el 'my fish'), with few nouns do not reduce their vowel (chim → chim·ak 'my hand')
• Double vowels are reduced to single vowels (deel → del·ek 'my nail'), sometimes reduced further to /ə/ (diil → del·ek) or even syncopated
• Due to syncopation, numerous complicated consonant clusters are produced, and some of them are simplified in Palauan (relm → lm·ek 'my water', tut → t·uk 'my breast')

Verb inflection

Palauan verb morphology is highly complex. menga(ng) 'eat', for example, may be analyzed as verb prefix me- + imperfective -ng- + kal, in which -kal is an archimorpheme that is only apparent from comparing various forms, e.g. kall 'food' and taking into consideration morphophonemic patterns: Ng milenga a ngikel a bilis 'the dog was eating fish' (lit. it VERB PREFIX-m eat-PAST INFIX-il- ARTICLE fish ARTICLE dog); Ng kma a ngikel a bilis 'The dog eats up fish' (lit. it-eat-PERFECTIVE-INFIX-m- fish ARTICLE dog). The verb system points to fossilized forms related to the Philippine languages.

Word order

The word order of Palauan is usually thought to be verb–object–subject (VOS), but this has been a matter of some debate in the linguistic literature.^[12] Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a pro-drop language with preverbal subject agreement morphemes, final pronominal subjects are deleted (or null).

Example 1: Ak milenga er a ringo pro. (means: 'I was eating the apple.')

In the preceding example, the abstract 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 Satsuko. (means: 'Satsuko was eating the apple.')

Proponents of the SVO analysis must assume a shifting of the subject a Satsuko 'Satsuko' from clause-initial to clause-final position, a movement operation that has not received acceptance cross-linguistically, but see Josephs 1975 for discussion.

Palauan phrases

Some common and useful words and phrases in Palauan are listed below, with their English translations.^[13]

Palauan English Alii! Hello! Ungil tutau. Good morning. Ungil sueleb. Good afternoon. Ungil kebesengei. Good evening. A ngklek a ___. My name is ___. Ng techa ngklem? What's your name? Ke ua ngerang? How are you? Ak mesisiich. I'm fine. Ak chad er a ___. I'm from ___. Belau Palau Merikel U.S. Ingklis England Siabal Japan Sina China Ke chad er ker el beluu? Where are you from? Ke mlechell er ker el beluu? Where were you born?

Palauan English Ak mlechell er a ___. I was born in ___. Ng tela a rekim? How old are you? Ng ___ a rekik. I am ___ years old. Ng tela a dengua er kau? What's your phone number? A dengua er ngak a ___. My phone number is ___. Ke kiei er ker? Where do you live? Ak kiei er a ___. I live ___. Chochoi. Yes. Ng diak. No. Adang. Please. Sulang. Thank you. Ke mo er ker? Where are you going? Mechikung. Goodbye. Meral ma sulang! Thank you very much! A klebokel el bung pretty flower.

Palauan numerals

1 to 10:

1. tang
2. erung
3. edei
4. euang
5. eim
6. elolm
7. euid
8. eai
9. etiu
10. tacher

Palauans have different numbers for different objects. For example, to count people, it is: tang, terung, tedei, teuang, teim, telolem, teuid, teai, tetiu, and teruich. Traditionally, there were separate counting sets for people, things, counting, ordinals, bunches of bananas, units of time, long objects, and rafts; however, several of these are no longer used.^[14]

Notes

1. The figure used here, for all countries, is from Ethnologue. According to the 2005 Palau Census, there are 18,544 people aged 5 years or older residing in the Republic of Palau, of whom 4,718 do not speak Palauan. There are thus an estimated 13,826 Palauan speakers in Palau as of 2005; the UNSD estimated 12,400 in Palau in 2008. This number does not include native Palauan speakers residing outside of Palau, who probably comprise several thousand additional speakers (4,000 according to Ethnologue). (See Nuger 2016:13.)
2. Katakana is no longer widely used, since the orthography based on Latin script has received official status and is taught in schools. But see Matsumoto 2001:90.
3. Josephs 1990, p. 95.
4. Blench, Roger. 2015. Early Oceanic contact with Palau: the evidence of fish names.
5. Only 5 vowel phonemes are listed in Wilson 1972 because she avoids the issue of how to treat indeterminate underlying vowels. The vowel chart here tentatively reflects the analysis of Flora (1974), who treats indeterminate vowels as instances of underlying ə. Furthermore, the analysis of Palauan [w] in Flora 1974 treats it as a phoneme distinct from /u/, while [w] is merely an allophone of /u/ according to Wilson (1972). The consonant chart tentatively reflects Wilson's analysis.
6. Josephs (1975), p. 3–18.
7. The final report of the Palau Orthography Committee was released as Yaoch et al. 1972.
8. Blust (2009), p. 318.
9. Zobel 2002, p. 417.
10. Josephs 1975, pp. 53, 79, 94, 103.
11. Note that some non-human animate plural nouns (animals) can stylistically inflect with the plural prefix re- if they are considered to be "sufficiently human" in some contexts, such as when talking about household pets that are like family members, or when anthropomorphized animal characters are described in stories. See Nuger 2016:172, fn. 9.
12. See Waters 1980, Georgopoulos 1986, and Georgopoulos 1991 for arguments in favor of treating Palauan as VOS. cf. Wilson 1972 and Josephs 1975, which assume an SVO order for Palauan. Georgopoulos (1991:32–41) and Josephs (1999:Chap. 15) provide clear and concise summaries of the debate and evidence in favor of the VOS analysis over the SVO analysis.
13. See Josephs 1990 for a more comprehensive list of words and phrases.
14. Palauan Language Online tekinged.com

References

Blust, Robert (1977), "The Proto-Austronesian pronouns and Austronesian subgrouping: A preliminary report", University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics, 9: 1–15. Blust, Robert (2009), "Palauan Historical Phonology: Whence the Intrusive Velar Nasal?", Oceanic Linguistics, 48 (2): 307–336, doi:10.1353/ol.0.0043, JSTOR 40783532, S2CID 145459409. Dempwolff, Otto (1934), Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes (in German), Berlin: Reimer. De Wolf, Charles (1988), "Voice in Austronesian Languages of Philippine type: passive, ergative, or neither", in Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and Voice, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 143–99. Dyen, Isidore (1965), A lexicostatistical classification of the Austronesian languages, Baltimore: Waverly Press (Memoir 19, Supplement to the International Journal of American Linguistics 31: 1). Flora, Jo-Ann (1974), Palauan Phonology and Morphology, PhD Dissertation: University of California, San Diego. Georgopoulos, Carol (1986), "Palauan as a VOS Language", in Paul Geraghty; Lois Carrington; Stephen A. Wurm (eds.), FOCAL I: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Pacific Linguistics Series C, No. 93, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 187–198, doi:10.15144/PL-C93, hdl:1885/145381, ISBN 978-0-85883-344-9. Georgopoulos, Carol (1991), Syntactic Variables: Resumptive Pronouns and A' Binding in Palauan, Dordrecht: Kluwer, ISBN 9789401132022. Hagège, Claude (1986), La langue Palau : une curiosité typologique (in French), Paderborg: Fink. Jackson, Frederick (1986), "On determining the external relationships of the Micronesian languages", in Paul Geraghty; Lois Carrington; Stephen A. Wurm (eds.), FOCAL II: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Pacific Linguistics Series C, No. 94, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 201–238, doi:10.15144/PL-C94, hdl:1885/145382, ISBN 978-0-85883-345-6. Josephs, Lewis (1975), Palauan Reference Grammar, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 9780824803315. Josephs, Lewis (1990), New Palauan-English Dictionary, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 9780824813451. Josephs, Lewis (1997), Handbook of Palauan Grammar (Vol. 1), Koror: Palau Ministry of Education. Josephs, Lewis (1999), Handbook of Palauan Grammar (Vol. 2), Koror: Palau Ministry of Education. Lemaréchal, Alain (1991). Problèmes de sémantique et de syntaxe en Palau. Sciences du Langage. Paris: CNRS. ISBN 9782222045946.. Matsumoto, Kazuko (2001), "Multilingualism in Palau: Language Contact with Japanese and English", in Thomas E. McAuley (ed.), Language change in East Asia, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 87–142. Nuger, Justin (2016), Building Predicates: The View from Palauan, Dordrecht: Springer. Pätzold, Klaus (1968), "Veröffentlichungen des Seminars für Indonesische and Südseesprachen der Universität Hamburg", Die Palau-Sprache und ihre Stellung zu anderen indonesischen Sprachen (PhD dissertation) (in German), Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, pp. 186p. Waters, Richard C. (1980), Topicalization and Passive in Palauan (PDF), Ms., MIT, archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-06-23, retrieved 2016-03-31. Wilson, Helen (1972), "The Phonology and Syntax of Palauan Verb Affixes" (PDF), University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics, 4 (5), archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-06-21, retrieved 2016-03-31. Yaoch, Felix; Morei, Francisco; Polloi, Huan; Sisior, Timarong; Ngeburch, Rengulbai; Ngodrii, Santos; Remarui, Hermana; Elechuus, Hubert; Emesiochl, Masa-Aki; Tmodrang, Masaharu; Sadang, Ngiraecherang (1972), Palauan orthography: A final report on the decisions of the Palau orthography committee (PDF), Ms., Pacific and Asian Linguistic Institute (PALI), University of Hawaii^[permanent dead link‍]. Zobel, Erik (2002), "The position of Chamorro and Palauan in the Austronesian family tree: Evidence from verb morphosyntax", in Fay Wouk; Malcolm Ross (eds.), The history and typology of Western Austronesian voice systems, Pacific Linguistics 518, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 405–434, doi:10.15144/PL-518, hdl:1885/146136, ISBN 978-0-85883-477-4. Zuraw, Kie (2003), "Vowel Reduction in Palauan Reduplicants" (PDF), in Andrea Rackowski; Norvin Richards (eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, Cambridge: MITWPL #44, pp. 385–398.

External links

• "Online Palauan-English Dictionary". Retrieved 1 November 2014.
• "A Palauan Linguistic Bibliography". Retrieved 30 March 2008.
• "Airai, Palau: Language". Retrieved 12 October 2007.
• "République de Belau" (in French). Retrieved 20 June 2007.
• "PREL - Pacific Area Language Materials: Palauan". Retrieved 9 February 2008.
• "Japanese and Other Loanwords in Palauan". 29 July 2007. Retrieved 3 February 2008.
• Robert Blust's fieldnotes for Palauan are archived at Kaipuleohone