Proto-Central Pacific (abbreviated as PCP) is the
reconstructed ancestor of the
Central Pacific languages
The family of Central Pacific or Central Oceanic languages, also known as Fijian–Polynesian, are a branch of the Oceanic languages
The approximately 450 Oceanic languages are a branch of the Austronesian languages. The area occupied by spea ...
. It belongs to the
Oceanic
Oceanic may refer to:
*Of or relating to the ocean
*Of or relating to Oceania
**Oceanic climate
**Oceanic languages
**Oceanic person or people, also called "Pacific Islander(s)"
Places
*Oceanic, British Columbia Oceanic is an unincorporated set ...
branch of the
Austronesian languages.
It was first proposed by
George W. Grace in 1959, who also named the subgroup in 1967. It was reconstructed by C.F. Hockett in 1976.
Descendants
Proto-Central Pacific, originally spoken by
Lapita
The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian peoples, Austronesian people and their material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. They are believed to have originated from ...
settlers in
Fiji three millennia ago, separated into a dialect network, consisting of what would become a western dialect (ancestral to
Rotuman and western
Fijian dialects) and an eastern dialect (ancestral to eastern
Fijian dialects and
Proto-Polynesian). Later, the dialects that remained in
Fiji converged back, eventually becoming more similar, leading to the present-day
Fijian language
Fijian (') is an Austronesian language of the Malayo-Polynesian family spoken by some 350,000–450,000 ethnic Fijians as a native language. The 2013 Constitution established Fijian as an official language of Fiji, along with English and Fi ...
.
Phonology
The phonology of Proto-Central Pacific, according to Geraghty (1986), are:
:
:
Example sentence
From Kikusawa (2000, 167)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Proto-Central Pacific language
*