Chamorro
Fino'Chamorro
Spoken in	Guam  Northern Mariana Islands
Region	Western Pacific Ocean
Ethnicity	Chamorro people
Native speakers	First language: more than 60,000  (date missing)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian (MP) Nuclear MP Sunda–Sulawesi MP ? Chamorro
Official status
Official language in	Guam  Northern Mariana Islands
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ch
ISO 639-2	cha
ISO 639-3	cha
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Chamorro (Chamorro: Fino' Chamoru or simply Chamoru) is a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language, spoken on the Mariana Islands (Guam, Rota, Tinian, and Saipan) by about 47,000 people (about 35,000 people on Guam and about 12,000 in the N. Marianas).^[1]

Speakers[link]

"Hafa Adai" sign at Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport in Guam

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The numbers of Chamorro speakers have declined in recent years, and the younger generations are less likely to know the language.^{[according to whom?]} The influence of English has caused the language to become endangered. On Guam (called "Guåhan" by Chamorro speakers, from the word guaha, meaning "have", but its English meaning is, "We Have", from the idea that they had everything they needed,^[2][3]) the number of native Chamorro speakers has dwindled in the last decade or so, while in the Northern Mariana Islands, young Chamorros still speak the language fluently. Various representatives from Guam have unsuccessfully lobbied the United States to take action to promote and protect the language.^{[citation needed]}

It is still common among Chamorro households in the Northern Marianas, but fluency has greatly decreased among Guamanian Chamorros during the years of American rule in favor of American English, which is commonplace throughout the inhabited Marianas.

Classification[link]

Unlike most of its neighbors, Chamorro is not a Micronesian or Polynesian language. Rather, like Palauan, it constitutes a possibly independent branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. Its indigenous origins are thus somewhat obscure. A 2008 analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database^[4] suggested an 85% confidence level that it is closest to the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Chamorro also has much Spanish influence, due to three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Many Chamorro nouns, adjectives, prepositions, numerals, and verbs are of Spanish origin. Under a historical point of view, it may be considered a mixed language, even if it is now independent and unique.^[5] When Guam was colonised by the United States, Chamorro was at the pre-stage of being transformed into a Spanish-based creole, and the transfer of rule made it so that it never reached that point.^{[citation needed]}

Orthography[link]

The letter ⟨y⟩ is pronounced more like dz (an approximation of the regional Spanish pronunciation of y as [dʒ]); nor are ⟨n⟩ and ⟨ñ⟩ or ⟨a⟩ and ⟨å⟩ always distinguished in print. Thus the Guamanian place name spelled Yona is pronounced [dzoɲa], not *[jona] as might be expected. ⟨Ch⟩ is usually pronounced like ts rather than like Engilsh ch. Chamorro ⟨r⟩ is a flap [ɾ], like Spanish r between vowels, and a retroflex approximant [ɻ ], like English r, at the beginning of words.

Chamorro has geminate consonants which are written double (GG, DD, KK, MM, NGNG, PP, SS, TT), native diphthongs AI and AO, plus OI, OE, IA, IU, IE in loanwords; penultimate stress, except where marked otherwise with an acute accent, as in asút "blue" or dángkulo "big". Unstressed vowels are limited to /ə i u/, though they are often spelled A E O. Syllables may be consonant-vowel-consonant, as in che’lu "sibling", diskatga "unload", mamahlao "shy", or oppop "lie face down", gatus (old word for 100), Hagåtña (Capital of Guam); B, D, and G are not distinguished from P, T, and K in that position^[vague].

Chamorro grammar[link]

Chamorro is an agglutinative language, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by a number of affixes. For example, masanganenñaihon "talked awhile (with/to)", passive marking prefix ma-, root verb sangan, referential 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: Chamorro very much uses its loan words in a Micronesian way (e.g.: bumobola "playing ball" from bola "ball, play ball" with verbalizing infix -um- and reduplication of first syllable of root).

Chamorro is predicate-initial, head-marking language. It has a rich agreement system both in the nominal and in the verbal domains. The following table gives the possessor-noun agreement suffixes:^[6]

Chamorro is also known for its wh-agreement in the verb: these agreement morphemes agree with features (roughly, the Grammatical case feature) of the question phrase, and replace the regular subject–verb agreement:^[7]

'Juan washed the car.'

'Who washed the car?'

Chamorro basic phrases[link]

Numbers[link]

Current common Chamorro uses only number words of Spanish origin: unu, dos, tres, etc. Old Chamorro used different number words based on categories: "Basic numbers" (for date, time, etc.), "living things", "inanimate things", and "long objects".

• The number 10 and its multiples up to 90 are: dies(10), benti(20), trenta(30), kuårenta(40), sinkuenta(50), sisenta(60), sitenta(70), ochenta(80), nubenta(90)
• Similar to Spanish terms: diez(10), veinte(20), treinta(30), cuarenta(40), cincuenta(50), sesenta(60), setenta(70), ochenta(80), noventa(90).

Chamorro Studies[link]

Chamorro language is studied at the University of Guam and in several academic institutions of Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Researches in several countries are also studying different aspects of Chamorro. In 2009, the Chamorro Linguistics International Network (CHIN) [1] was established in Bremen, Germany. CHiN was founded on occasion of the Chamorro Day (27 September 2009) which was part of the programme of the Festival of Languages [2]. The foundation ceremony was attended by people from Germany, Guam, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States of America. ^[11]

See also[link]

Chamorro language spread in the United States

	Micronesia portal
	Language portal

• Proposed name change for Guam

Notes[link]

General references[link]

• Aguon, K. B. (1995). Chamorro: a complete course of study. Agana, Guam: K.B. Aguon.
• Chung, Sandra. 1998. The design of agreement: Evidence from Chamorro. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
• Rodríguez-Ponga, Rafael (2003). El elemento español en la lengua chamorra. Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad Complutense (Complutense University of Madrid). http://eprints.ucm.es/3664/
• Topping, Donald M. (1973). Chamorro reference grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
• Topping, Donald M., Pedro M. Ogo, and Bernadita C. Dungca (1975). Chamorro-English dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
• Topping, Donald M. (1980). Spoken Chamorro: with grammatical notes and glossary, rev. ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
• Hunt, Mike (2008). "Speaking Chamoru Moru Moru". San Roque, Saipan.

External links[link]

Chamorro language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Chamorro language at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
• Chamorro-English Online Dictionary
• http://ns.gov.gu/language.html
• http://www.offisland.com/thelanguage.html
• http://www.chamorro.com/fino/fino.html
• Chamorro-English dictionary, partially available at Google Books.
• A Chamorro Reference Grammar, partially available at Google Books.
• http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Chamorro-english/
• Chamorro Wordlist at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database
• http://www.sous-le-soleil-de-guam.com
• http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/chin/ Chamorro Linguistics International Network (CHIN).