Morphosyntactic Evidence for the Position of Chamorro in the Austronesian Language Family

The Chamorro language is an Austronesian language spoken in the Marianas Islands. Its position within the Austronesian language family has been a continuing topic of discussion for more than a hundred years. The difficulty in determining its position has apparently resulted from linguistic contact with a variety of other languages, both Oceanic as well as Western Austronesian, ranging from chance settlement from drifting sailors, to established trade networks with other island groups, possibly exchange of wives, and probably also through invasion by other Austronesian-speaking groups and eventually in historic times, through colonialisation under Spanish, German, Japanese and American governments. Other factors, such as natural disasters (the Marianas is not infrequently devastated by typhoons) and introduced diseases, are known to have at various times severely reduced population levels in the Marianas, and this again would have probably hastened change in the language

Afro-Hispanic varieties in comparison – new light from phylogeny

Peer reviewe