Chamorro
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Fact corner
- Language: Chamorro
- Alternate names: Tjamoro
- SIL-code: Ethnologue:wad
- Language family: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Chamorro
- Number of speakers: 76,705
- Script: Latin script
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Introduction
Chamorro is a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language, spoken on the Mariana islands, especially Guam and Saipan.
It is an agglutinative language, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by a number of affixes. For example, masanganenñaihon "talked awhile (with/to)", passivizing prefix ma-, root verb sangan, directional suffix i "to" (forced morphophonemically to change to e) with excrescent consonant n, and suffix ñaihon "a short amount of time". Thus Masanganenñaihon gue' "He/she was told (something) for a while".
Chamorro has many Spanish loanwords and other words have Spanish etymological roots (e.g. tenda "shop/store" from Spanish tienda), which may lead some to mistakenly conclude that the language is a Spanish Creole.
The verb
Chamorro very much uses its loan words in a Micronesian way (eg: bumobola "playing ball" from bola "ball, play ball" with verbalizing infix -um- and reduplication of first syllable of root).
Sample verb: kuentos
| Present | ||
| Sg.1 | kumuentos | yo´ |
| Sg.2 | hao | |
| Sg.3 | gue´ | |
| Pl.1, inclusive | hit | |
| Pl.1, exclusive | ham | |
| Pl.2 | hamyo | |
| Pl.3 | siha | |
Click verbs to conjugate them in the table above!
References
- Topping, Donald M.. Chamorro Reference Grammar (Micronesia).
University of Hawai'i Press. Honolulu. 1980.