Palauan

Where Palauan fits among the Austronesian languages

Palauan is not closely related to other Malayo-Polynesian languages. Roger Blench argued in 2015 that fish names show early contact with Oceanic languages, either directly or through Yapese: the words for sea eel, yellowfin tuna, barracuda and trevally among them. That would mean Oceanic speakers had fished and traded around Palau for a long time. Blench also found influence from Central Philippine and Samalic languages, and the verb system holds fossilised forms related to the Philippine languages. Palauan has no n: Proto-Malayo-Polynesian n became l, a shift also seen in Gorontalo.

Why ch spells a glottal stop

The Palau Orthography Committee worked with linguists from the University of Hawaiʻi in the early 1970s on a one-sound, one-letter alphabet: twelve native consonants, six more for loanwords and ten vowels. The digraph ch now always stands for a glottal stop. It survives from a spelling devised under German rule, when the sound was still a fricative, and some older Palauans remember grandparents who said it that way.

The letter e covers both a full vowel in stressed syllables, as in sers, "garden", and a schwa in unstressed ones, as in ngalek, "child". Josephs wrote the schwa as ę in his 1975 grammar and dropped it in his 1990 dictionary. On 10 May 2007 the Senate of Palau passed a bill requiring schools to recognise the orthography in Josephs' works of 1997 and 1999, and setting up an Orthography Commission to regulate changes.

How Palauan marks people and owners

Only human nouns show the plural, with the prefix re-: chad is "person" and rechad "people", while bad can mean one stone or many. Possessed nouns take a suffix for the owner, so tebel, "table", becomes tebelek, "my table", and many of these suffixes are irregular and must be learned noun by noun.