# Palauan language

Palauan (a tekoi er a Belau) is a Malayo-Polynesian language native to the Republic of Palau, where it is one of the two official languages, alongside English. It is widely used in day-to-day life in the country. Palauan is not closely related to other Malayo-Polynesian languages and its exact classification within the branch is unclear.

## Classification

It is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages, and is one of only two indigenous languages in Micronesia that are not part of the Oceanic sub-branch of that family, the other being Chamorro (see Dempwolff 1934, Blust 1977, Jackson 1986, and Zobel 2002).
Roger Blench (2015) argues that based on evidence from fish names, Palauan had early contact with Oceanic languages either directly or indirectly via the Yapese language. These include fish names for the sea eel, yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), left-eye flounder (Bothus mancus), triggerfish, sailfish, barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda), damsel fish (Abudefduf sp.), squirrelfish (Holocentrus spp.), unicorn fish (Naso spp.), trevally, land crab (Cardisoma rotundus), and wrasse. This suggests that Oceanic speakers had influenced the fishing culture of Palau, and had been fishing and trading in the vicinity of Palau for quite some time. Blench (2015) also suggests that the Palauan language displays influence from Central Philippine languages and Samalic languages.

## Phonology

The phonemic inventory of Palauan consists of 10 consonants and 6 vowels. Phonetic charts of the vowel and consonant phonemes are provided below, utilizing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Vowel phonemes :
| | Front | Central | Back |
| High | i | | u |
| Mid | ɛ | ə | o |
| Low | | a | |

### Allophones

While the phonemic inventory of Palauan is relatively small, comparatively, many phonemes contain at least two allophones that surface as the result of various phonological processes within the language. The full phonetic inventory of consonants is given below in IPA (the phonemic inventory of vowels, above, is complete).
Consonant allophones :
* Consonant allophones
* Bilabial
* Dental
* Alveolar
* Palatal
* Velar
* Glottal
* Nasal
* m
* n
* ŋ
* Stop
* p pʰb
* t tʰd
* k kʰɡ
* ʔ
* Fricative
* θð
* s
* Approximant (Lateral)
* j
* w
* l
* Flap
* ɾ
* Trill
* r
The following is the table of allophones and their contexts in Palauan.
| Phoneme | Allophone | Context |
| /b/ | [p] | Word final, e.g. tub [tʰup] "spit" Before another consonant, e.g. brer [prɛr] |
| /d/ | [ð] | Word initially (in careful speech), e.g. dub [ðup] "dynamite" |

### Diphthongs

Palauan contains several diphthongs (sequences of vowels within a single syllable). A list of diphthongs and corresponding Palauan words containing them are given below, adapted from Zuraw (2003).
Diphthongs :
| IPA | Example | English Translation |
| /iɛ/ | babier | "paper" (German loan) |
| /iu/ | chiukl | "(singing) voice" |
| /io/ | kikiongel | "dirty" |
| /ia/ | diall | "ship" |
| /ɛi/ | mei | "come" |
| /ɛu/ | teu | "width" |
| /ɛo/ | Oreor | "Koror" (former capital of Palau) |
| /ɛa/ | beached | "tin" |
| /ui/ | tuich | "torch" |
| /uɛ/ | sueleb | "afternoon" |
| /uo/ | uos | "horse" (English loan) |
| /ua/ | tuangel | "door" |
| /oi/ | tekoi | "word" |
| /oɛ/ | beroel | "spear" |
| /ou/ | merous | "distribute" |
| /oa/ | omoachel | "river" |
| /ai/ | chais | "news" |
| /aɛ/ | baeb | "pipe" (English loan) |
| /au/ | mesaul | "tired" |
| /ao/ | taod | "fork" |
The extent to which it is accurate to characterize each of these vowel sequences as diphthongs has been a matter of debate, as in Wilson 1972, Flora 1974, Josephs 1975 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFJosephs1975 (help), and Zuraw 2003. Nevertheless, a number of the sequences above, such as /ui/, clearly behave as diphthongs given their interaction with other aspects of Palauan phonology like stress shift and vowel reduction. Others do not behave as clearly like monosyllabic diphthongs.

## Writing system

In the early 1970s, the Palau Orthography Committee worked with linguists from the University of Hawaii to devise an alphabet based on the Latin script. The resulting orthography was largely based on the "one phoneme/one symbol" notion, producing an alphabet of twelve native consonants, six consonants for use in loan words, and ten vowels. The 20 vowel sequences listed under Diphthongs are also all officially recognized in the orthography.
Most of the letters/graphemes in written Palauan correspond to phonemes that can be represented by the corresponding segments in the International Phonetic Alphabet (Nuger 2016:308), e.g., Palauan ⟨b⟩ is the phoneme /b/. Three notable exceptions are worth mentioning:
* The first is ⟨ch⟩, which is invariably pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ]. The ch digraph is a remnant of an earlier writing system developed during German occupation when the glottal stop was pronounced as a fricative [x]; some older Palauans still remember their grandparents pronouncing ch this way. In modern Palauan usage the sound [x] has been completely replaced by [ʔ], but the ch spelling persists.
* The second is ⟨e⟩. It represents sometimes the full vowel [ɛ] as in sers 'garden', and sometimes a schwa [ə], as in ngalek 'child'. The distribution of the two pronunciations is similar to those of English vowel reduction: [ɛ] is found in stressed syllables vs. [ə] in unstressed ones (compare Eng. fell vs. fallen).
** The two sounds [ɛ] and [ə] were once distinguished in the orthography, as the schwa [ə] was spelled ⟨ę⟩, using an ogonek: e.g. ngalęk 'child'. This was the orthography used by Josephs in his 1975 grammar; yet the same author has used a simple ⟨e⟩ in his later work, e.g. his 1990 dictionary.
* The third is the digraph ⟨ng⟩, which is a (phonemic) velar nasal /ŋ/ but can assimilate to be pronounced as [m] or [n].
There is no phonemic /n/ in Palauan: this gap is due to a historical sound shift from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *n to /l/ ‒ a change that is also found elsewhere in the region (e.g. in Gorontalo).
On May 10, 2007, the Senate of Palau passed Bill No. 7-79, which mandates that educational institutions recognize the Palauan orthography laid out in Josephs 1997 and Josephs 1999. The bill also establishes an Orthography Commission to maintain the language as it develops as well as to oversee and regulate any additions or modifications to the current official orthography.
Native consonants :
| Palauan grapheme | IPA | Example word |
| b | [b], [p], [bʱ], [pʰ] | bai 'community house' |
| ch | [ʔ] | charm 'animal' |
| d | [d], [t], [ð], [θ] | diall 'ship' |
| k | [k], [ɡ], [kʰ], [ɡʱ] | ker 'question' |
| l | [l] | lius 'coconut' |
| ll | [lː] | llel 'leaf' |
| m | [m] | martiliong 'hammer' (Span. Martillo) |
| ng | [ŋ], [n] | ngau 'fire' |
| r | [ɾ] | rekas 'mosquito' |
| rr | [r] | rrom 'liquor' |
| s | [s] | sechelei 'friend' |
| t | [t], [tʰ] | tuu 'banana' |
Foreign consonants :
| Palauan grapheme | IPA | Example word |
| f | [f] | fenda 'fender' (Eng.) |
| h | [h] | haibio 'tuberculosis' (Jpn. haibyoo 肺病) |
| n | [n] | sensei 'teacher' (Jpn. sensei 先生)" |
| p | [p] | Papa 'the Pope' (Span. Papa) |
| ts | [ts] | tsuingam 'chewing gum' (Eng.) |
| z | [z] | miuzium 'museum' (Eng.) |
Vowels :
| Palauan grapheme | IPA | Example word |
| a | [a] | chad 'person' |
| e | [ɛ] | sers 'garden' |
| e | [ə] | ngalek 'child' |
| ee | [ɛː] | kmeed 'near' |
| i | [i] | sils 'sun' |
| ii | [iː], [ji], [ij] | iis 'nose' |
| o | [o] | ngor 'mouth' |
| oo | [oː] | sekool 'playful' |
| u | [u] | bung 'flower' |
| uu | [uː], [wu], [uw] | ngduul 'mangrove clam' |

## Grammar
### Pronouns

The following set of pronouns are the pronouns found in the Palauan language:
| | Free | NOM I | NOM II | OBJ | POSS |
| 1st person singular | ngak | ak | k- | -ak | -k |
| 2nd person singular | kau | kə | chom- | -au | -m |
| 3rd person singular | ngii | ng | l- | -ii | -l |
| 1st person plural inclusive | kid | kədə | d- | -id | -d |
| 1st person plural exclusive | kəmam | aki | -kim | -əmam | -(m)am |
| 2nd person plural | kəmiu | kom | chom- | -əmiu | -(m)iu |
| 3rd person plural | tir | tə | -l | -tərir | -rir |

### Noun inflection

Palauan nouns inflect based on humanness and number via the plural prefix re-, which attaches to plural human nouns (see Josephs 1975:43 harvcolnb error: no target: CITEREFJosephs1975 (help)). For example, the word chad 'person' is a human noun that is unambiguously singular, whereas the noun rechad people is a human noun that is unambiguously plural. Non-human nouns do not display this distinction, e.g., the word for 'stone', bad, can denote either a singular 'stone' or multiple 'stones.'
Some possessed nouns in Palauan also inflect to agree with the person, number, and humanness of their possessors. For example, the unpossessed noun tebel means simply 'table,' whereas one of its possessed forms tebelek means 'my table.' Possessor agreement is always registered via the addition of a suffix to the noun (also triggering a shift in stress to the suffix). The possessor agreement suffixes have many different irregular forms that only attach to particular nouns, and they must be memorized on a noun-by-noun basis (Josephs 1997:96). However, there is a "default" e-set suffixes (see Josephs 1997:93 and Nuger 2016:28), shown below:
E-set :
| | | Singular | Plural | Plural |
| | | Singular | Inclusive | Exclusive |
| 1st person | 1st person | -ek | -ed | -am |
| 2nd person | 2nd person | -em | -iu | -iu |
| 3rd person | human | -el | -ir | -ir |
| 3rd person | nonhuman | -el | -el | -el |
U-set, I-set, and A-set :
| | | Singular | Plural | Plural |
| | | Singular | Inclusive | Exclusive |
| 1st person | 1st person | -Vk | -Vd | -(e)mam |
| 2nd person | 2nd person | -Vm | -(e)miu | -(e)miu |
| 3rd person | human | -Vl | -(e)rir | -(e)rir |
| 3rd person | nonhuman | -Vl | -Vl | -Vl |
| Note that -V- represents vowels -u-, -i-, or -a-. |||||
There are some morphophonological changes, often unpredictable, including: (Josephs 1997)
* Single vowels are reduced to /ə/, written as e (bad → bed·uk 'my stone'), or being syncopated entirely (ngikel → ngkel·el 'my fish'), with few nouns do not reduce their vowel (chim → chim·ak 'my hand')
* Double vowels are reduced to single vowels (deel → del·ek 'my nail'), sometimes reduced further to /ə/ (diil → del·ek) or even syncopated
* Due to syncopation, numerous complicated consonant clusters are produced, and some of them are simplified in Palauan (relm → lm·ek 'my water', tut → t·uk 'my breast')

### Verb inflection

Palauan verb morphology is highly complex. menga(ng) 'eat', for example, may be analyzed as verb prefix me- + imperfective -ng- + kal, in which -kal is an archimorpheme that is only apparent from comparing various forms, e.g. kall 'food' and taking into consideration morphophonemic patterns: Ng milenga a ngikel a bilis 'the dog was eating fish' (lit. it VERB PREFIX-m eat-PAST INFIX-il- ARTICLE fish ARTICLE dog); Ng kma a ngikel a bilis 'The dog eats up fish' (lit. it-eat-PERFECTIVE-INFIX-m- fish ARTICLE dog). The verb system points to fossilized forms related to the Philippine languages.

### Word order

The word order of Palauan is usually thought to be verb–object–subject (VOS), but this has been a matter of some debate in the linguistic literature. Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a pro-drop language with preverbal subject agreement morphemes, final pronominal subjects are deleted (or null).
Example 1: Ak milenga er a ringo pro. (means: 'I was eating the apple.')
In the preceding example, the abstract null pronoun pro is the subject 'I,' while the clause-initial ak is the first person singular subject agreement morpheme.
On the other hand, those who have analyzed Palauan as SVO necessarily reject the pro-drop analysis, instead analyzing the subject agreement morphemes as subject pronouns. In the preceding example, SVO-advocates assume that there is no pro and that the morpheme ak is simply an overt subject pronoun meaning 'I'. One potential problem with this analysis is that it fails to explain why overt (3rd person) subjects occur clause-finally in the presence of a co-referring 3rd person "subject pronoun" --- treating the subject pronouns as agreement morphemes circumvents this weakness. Consider the following example.
Example 2: Ng milenga er a ringngo a Satsuko. (means: 'Satsuko was eating the apple.')
Proponents of the SVO analysis must assume a shifting of the subject a Satsuko 'Satsuko' from clause-initial to clause-final position, a movement operation that has not received acceptance cross-linguistically, but see Josephs 1975 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFJosephs1975 (help) for discussion.

## Palauan phrases

Some common and useful words and phrases in Palauan are listed below, with their English translations.
| Palauan | English |
| Alii! | Hello! |
| Ungil tutau. | Good morning. |
| Ungil sueleb. | Good afternoon. |
| Ungil kebesengei. | Good evening. |
| A ngklek a ___. | My name is ___. |
| Ng techa ngklem? | What's your name? |
| Ke ua ngerang? | How are you? |
| Ak mesisiich. | I'm fine. |
| Ak chad er a ___. | I'm from ___. |
| Belau | Palau |
| Merikel | U.S. |
| Ingklis | England |
| Siabal | Japan |
| Sina | China |
| Ke chad er ker el beluu? | Where are you from? |
| Ke mlechell er ker el beluu? | Where were you born? |
| Palauan | English |
| Ak mlechell er a ___. | I was born in ___. |
| Ng tela a rekim? | How old are you? |
| Ng ___ a rekik. | I am ___ years old. |
| Ng tela a dengua er kau? | What's your phone number? |
| A dengua er ngak a ___. | My phone number is ___. |
| Ke kiei er ker? | Where do you live? |
| Ak kiei er a ___. | I live ___. |
| Chochoi. | Yes. |
| Ng diak. | No. |
| Adang. | Please. |
| Sulang. | Thank you. |
| Ke mo er ker? | Where are you going? |
| Mechikung. | Goodbye. |
| Meral ma sulang! | Thank you very much! |
| A klebokel el bung | pretty flower. |

## Palauan numerals

1 to 10:
* tang
* erung
* edei
* euang
* eim
* elolm
* euid
* eai
* etiu
* tacher
Palauans have different numbers for different objects. For example, to count people, it is: tang, terung, tedei, teuang, teim, telolem, teuid, teai, tetiu, and teruich. Traditionally, there were separate counting sets for people, things, counting, ordinals, bunches of bananas, units of time, long objects, and rafts; however, several of these are no longer used.