Ponapean
| Pohnpeian | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Micronesia |
| Region | Pohnpei |
|
Native speakers
|
31,000 (2001) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Dialects | |
| Latin script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | pon |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | pohn1238 |
Pohnpeian, also rendered as Ponapean, is a Micronesian language spoken as the indigenous language of the island of Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands. Pohnpeian has approximately 34,000 native speakers living in Pohnpei and its outlying atolls and islands with another 10,000-15,000 living off island in parts of the US mainland, Hawaii and Guam.. It is the second most widely spoken native language of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Pohnpeian features a "high language" including some specialized vocabulary, used in speaking about people of high rank.
Pohnpeian is most closely related to the Chuukic languages of Chuuk (formerly Truk). Ngatikese, Pingelapese and Mwokilese of the Pohnpeic languages are closely related languages to Pohnpeian. Pohnpeian shares 81% lexical similarity with Pingelapese, 75% with Mokilese, and 36% with Chuukese.
Pohnpeian employs a great deal of loanwords from colonial languages such as English, Japanese, Spanish, and German. However, these "loanwords" are neither spelled or pronounced the same as the source language.
Modern Pohnpeian uses twenty letters — sixteen single letters and four digraphs — collated in a unique order:
As German missionaries designed the orthography, Pohnpeian spelling uses -h to mark a long vowel, rather like German: dohl 'mountain'. The IPA equivalents of written Pohnpeian are as follows:
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