Portal:Oceania/Selected article/February, 2008

The Polynesian languages are a language family spoken in the region known as Polynesia. They are classified as part of the Austronesian family, belonging to the Eastern Eastern Malayo-Polynesian branch of that family. They fall into two branches: Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian.

There are approximately forty Polynesian languages. The most prominent of these are Tahitian, Samoan,  Tongan,  Māori, and  Hawaiian. Because the Polynesian islands were settled relatively recently and because internal linguistic diversification only began around 2,000 years ago, their languages retain strong commonalities.

Similarities in basic vocabulary may allow speakers from different island groups to achieve a surprising degree of understanding of each other's speech. When a particular language shows unexpectedly large divergence in vocabulary, this may be the result of a name-avoidance taboo situation - see examples in Tahitian, where this has happened often.

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