Welcome to week 12 of our language odyssey! At the end of last week’s post, we touched upon one of the most ancient language families, Austronesian, and it sparked our interest. So, for this week we’ve decided to look at another language in the Austronesian family - this is our Five Fun Facts about Fijian!
1) Fijian is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian family, part of the wider Austronesian language group. With 450,000 first-language speakers, over half the population of Fiji speak Fijian and, along with English and Hindustani, it is one of the official languages of Fiji.
2) Standard Fijian is based on the East Fijian language of Bau. East Fijian languages are more closely related to Polynesian than to West Fijian, which is related to Rotuman. However, in recent times increased contact has caused them to reconverge to an extent.
3) In terms of syntax, the normal Fijian word order is VOS, or verb-subject-object. For example, in Fijian you say:
E rai-c-a na no-na vale na gone.
(See the house the child)
Which in English would become ‘The child sees the house.’
This word order is common in other Austronesian languages, such as Malagase, Old Javanese and Toba Batak, as well as in Mayan languages, such as Tzotzil.
4) The Fijian language is written in an alphabet based on the Latin script. It consists of 23 letters, with no ‘h’, ‘x’ or ‘z’. Among the consonants, there is almost a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes, and vowel letters 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' and 'u' have roughly their IPA values, [a ɛ~e i ɔ~o u].
5) The 1997 constitution made Fijian a co-offical language but in May and June 2005, a number of Islanders called for the status of Fijian to be upgraded again, in order to make it a national language. Fijian is still not a compulsory subject in schools in Fiji, but a number of important people have called for it to be so. Misiwini Qereqeretabua, the Director of the Institute of Fijian Language and Culture, and Apolonia Tamata, a linguistics lecturer at Suva’s University of the South Pacific, both said that recognition of the Fijian language is essential to the nation’s basic identity, as a unifying factor in Fiji’s multicultural society.
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Inuit!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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