Oceanic

The Oceanic languages form the easternmost major branch of the Austronesian family, comprising some 450 tongues spread across Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, from the Bismarck Archipelago to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.

Their reconstructed ancestor, Proto-Oceanic, was carried by the seafarers of the Lapita culture, who between 1600 and 500 BCE spread out of the Bismarck Archipelago with dentate-stamped pottery and outrigger canoes, reaching Tonga and Samoa by roughly 1000 BCE. Later Polynesian voyagers settled Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island in the first millennium of the current era.

Long contact with the Papuan languages of northern New Guinea reshaped Oceanic grammar while leaving its Austronesian vocabulary largely intact, producing the dense linguistic mosaic of the Solomon Sea. European navigators entered this world from the sixteenth century, beginning with the Spanish voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña to the Solomons in 1568.