OCEANIC LANGUAGES

also called Eastern Austronesian, widespread, highly varied, and controversial language group of the Austronesian language family. Spoken on the islands of Oceania from New Guinea to Hawaii to Easter Island, certain of these languages share so little basic vocabulary that some scholars prefer to classify them in smaller, more cohesive groups. The features shared include a tendency toward use of separate words rather than affixes to express grammatical relationships, a basic five-vowel system, and several common phonetic simplifications of the original Austronesian sound system. The Oceanic group contains about 450 languages, of which more than 400 are spoken in Melanesia and the rest in Polynesia and Micronesia.