- Official language in
- Palau
- Script
- Latin
Where it's spoken
Article XIII of the Constitution of the Republic of Palau states: "The Palauan traditional languages shall be the national languages. Palauan and English shall be the official languages. The Olbiil Era Kelulau shall determine the appropriate use of each language."
Palau's national census found that outside Palau's two developed states, Koror and Airai, English and other languages are secondary to Palauan.
Sources
- Palau's Constitution of 1981, with Amendments through 1992 — Art. XIII (General Provisions), §1
- Republic of Palau, Office of Planning and Statistics — 2005 Census of Population and Housing, Census Monograph — Conclusions on geographic language use
Script & pronunciation
Palauan is written with Latin letters. Josephs's reference grammar charts its consonants as b, t, d, k, the digraph ch (a single glottal-stop consonant, not two sounds), s, the nasals m and the digraph ng, and r, l; its vowels are i, e, a mid-central schwa (Josephs writes it ȩ, though this app's cards do not use that letter), u, o, and a.
This app's own romanization is not a pronunciation guide: it is the same Palauan spelling divided into syllables by hyphens; some cards also capitalize the stressed syllable, as in Alii → a-LII ("Hello (Palauan greeting)"). Its house style keeps this syllable-hyphenation even where it cuts across the ng digraph, as in ungil → un-gil.
Sources
- Josephs, Lewis S. (1975). Palauan Reference Grammar. The University Press of Hawaii. Open Access edition, 2019. — §1.3–1.4, charts of Palauan consonants and vowels; the glottal stop ch
Grammar essentials
Basic Palauan word order is verb-first: Georgopoulos argues for VOS (verb–object–subject), against Josephs's earlier subject-verb-object analysis of the same language. Georgopoulos analyzes subject agreement as prefixed to the verb, with subjects naturally coming last; as this app's own card for "Ng mo el bub a laochel" ("A storm is approaching") notes, the preverbal particles ak, ke, and ng carry this subject agreement, with a laochel ("the storm") as the clause-final subject, following Georgopoulos's analysis. Josephs spells ak, ng, kȩ as separate subject pronouns, though he notes many linguists would treat them as prefixes. Palauan noun phrases carry no case marking, so word order is what shows which one is the subject.
Negation mainly uses the negative verb diak ("isn't, doesn't exist"), as in this app's plain "Ng diak" for "No."
Sources
- Georgopoulos, Carol (1986). "Palauan as a VOS Language." In Geraghty, P., Carrington, L. and Wurm, S.A. (eds.), FOCAL I: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, pp. 187–198. Pacific Linguistics C-93. — VOS vs. Josephs's SVO; subject agreement prefixed to the verb; no case marking of NPs
- Josephs, Lewis S. (1975). Palauan Reference Grammar. The University Press of Hawaii. Open Access edition, 2019. — Non-emphatic subject pronouns ak, ng, kȩ; the negative verb diak
Politeness & etiquette
The tekinged dictionary glosses sulang "thank you" as more casual than mesulang. This app's own card for "Sulang el omechar!" ("Thank you for the purchase!") notes that a fuller, politer thanks is "Ke kmal mesulang."
Separately, Josephs describes a way to soften a command into a polite suggestion: adding the reciprocal prefix ka- to a verb's hypothetical form turns a plain imperative into a milder one.
Sources
- Josephs, Lewis S. (1975). Palauan Reference Grammar. The University Press of Hawaii. Open Access edition, 2019. — Extended function of the reciprocal prefix ka- (weakening commands)
- tekinged.com — Palauan-English dictionary — Entry for "sulang" (cross-references "mesulang" and "saul")