POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES

group of about 30 languages belonging to the Eastern, or Oceanic, branch of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family and most closely related to the languages of Micronesia and Melanesia. Spoken by fewer than 1,000,000 persons spread across a large section of the Pacific Ocean, the Polynesian languages show a relative homogeneity, indicating that they have dispersed only in the last 2,500 years from an original centre in the Tonga-Samoa area. The best-known Polynesian languages are Samoan, with about 200,000 speakers; Maori, spoken in New Zealand by about 100,000 persons; Tahitian, with an unknown number of native speakers but widely used as a lingua franca in French Polynesia; and Hawaiian, with only a few remaining native speakers but formerly spoken by perhaps 100,000 persons. Samoan is the national language of Samoa (formerly Western Samoa), and Tongan is the official tongue of the Kingdom of Tonga. The Polynesian languages are notable for their scarcity of consonants; they make heavy use of vowels, distinguishing long and short forms of all vowels. One of the major features of Polynesian grammar is the reliance on particles, small separate words that function as grammatical markers of various sorts, standing before or after the words they modify, in some ways similar to English prepositions, conjunctions, and articles.