Chamorro Chamoru
Spoken in:	Guam, Northern Mariana Islands
Region:	Western Pacific Ocean
Total speakers:	First language: more than 60,000
Language family:	Austronesian  Malayo-Polynesian (MP)   Nuclear MP    Sunda-Sulawesi     Chamorro
Official status
Official language of:	Guam, Northern Mariana Islands
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	ch
ISO 639-2:	cha
ISO 639-3:	cha
Chamorro language spread in the United States
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Chamorro (Chamoru in "Chamorro") is the native language of the Chamorro or Chamoru of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam. It is also used in the mainland United States by immigrants and some of their descendants. A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common proto-language. ... The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ... The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages used by some 351 million speakers. ... The Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian languages are a branch of the Austronesian family that are thought to have dispersed from a possible homeland in Sulawesi. ... The Sunda-Sulawesi languages (or Inner Hesperonesian or Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian languages) are a branch of the Austronesian family which include the languages of Sulawesi and the Greater Sunda Islands, as well as a few outliers such as Charmorro and Palauan, as outlined in Wouk and Ross (2002). ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. ... Image File history File links Chamorro_USC2000_PHS.svg‎ The language spread of Chamorro in the United States according to U. S. Census 2000 and other resources interpreted by research of U. S. ENGLISH Foundation, percentage of home speakers. ... Image File history File links Chamorro_USC2000_PHS.svg‎ The language spread of Chamorro in the United States according to U. S. Census 2000 and other resources interpreted by research of U. S. ENGLISH Foundation, percentage of home speakers. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... Depiction of latte stone colonnades on the island of Tinian. ...

It is an agglutinative language, grammatically allowing root words to be modified by an unlimited number of affixes. For example, manmasanganenñaihon "(plural) talked awhile (with/to)" from pluralizing prefix man-, past tensifying prefix ma-, root verb sangan, suffix i "to" (forced morphophonemically to change to e) with excrescent consonant n, and suffix ñaihon "a short amount of time". Thus "In manmasanganenñaihon gui' ": "We (exclusive) talked to him/her for a bit". It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme to form a word. ... In phonology, the word morphophonemic describes anything relating primarily to phonemes, but secondarily to morphemes. ...

A large number of Chamorro words have Spanish etymological roots (e.g. tenda "shop/store" from Spanish tienda), which may lead some to mistakenly conclude that the language is a Spanish Creole: Chamorro very much uses its loan words in a Micronesian way (eg: bumobola "playing ball" from bola "ball, play ball" with verbalizing infix -um- and reduplication of first syllable of root). A number of Creole languages are based on the Spanish language. ... For other uses, see Ball (disambiguation). ... An infix is an affix inserted inside an existing word. ... Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated. ...

The numbers of Chamorro speakers have declined in recent years, and the younger generations are less likely to know the language. The influence of English has caused the language to become endangered. Various representatives from Guam have unsuccessfully lobbied the United States to take action to promote and protect the language.^{[citation needed]} In Guam (called "Guåhan" by Chamorro speakers, from the word guaha, meaning "have"), the number of native Chamorro speakers have dwindled in numbers in the last decade or so while in the Northern Mariana Islands, young Chamorros still speak the language fluently.

There are approximately 50,000 to 75,000 speakers of Chamorro throughout the Marianas archipelago. It is still common among Chamorro households in the Northern Marianas, but fluency has greatly decreased among Guamanian Chamorros during the years of American rule in favor of (a largely pidginized) American English, which is commonplace throughout the inhabited Marianas. Mariana Islands (sometimes called The Marianas; up to the early 20th century sometimes called the Ladrone Islands) are a group of islands made up by the summits of 15 volcanic mountains in the Pacific Ocean. ... This article is about simplified languages. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

Alphabet

' (glottal stop), A, Å, B, Ch, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, Ñ, Ng, O, P, R, S, T, U, Y

Note that the letter Y is pronounced more like 'dz' (an approximation of the regional Spanish pronunciation of "Y"/"Ll" as "(d)ʒ", the exact sound of which did not exist among the Chamoru); nor are N and Ñ always distinguished. Thus the Guamanian place name spelled Yona is pronounced 'dzo-nia', not 'yo-na' as might be expected. Note also that Ch is usually pronounced like 'ts' rather than 'tsh' and that A and Å are not always distinguished in written Chamorro (often being written simply as 'A'). This article does not cite any references or sources. ... For other uses of A, see A (disambiguation). ... The letter Ã… represents various o sounds in the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, North Frisian, Walloon, Chamorro and Istro-Romanian language alphabets. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... CH can mean: Cargo helicopter (U.S. military helicopter alpha-numeric prefix) Companion of Honour, a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, which is a British and Commonwealth Order. ... For other uses, see D (disambiguation). ... Look up E, e in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up F, f in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For other uses, see G (disambiguation). ... Look up H, h in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up I, i in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up K, k in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For other uses, see L (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see M (disambiguation). ... Look up N, n in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Ñ and ñ in Arial and Times New Roman, with an example word from Panare Ñ is a letter of the modern Roman alphabet formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. ... Ng is also considered a single character in the Maori and Filipino languages. ... Look up O, o in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article is about the Latin alphabet letter. ... Look up R, r in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up S, s in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For other uses, see T (disambiguation). ... For other uses of U, see U (disambiguation). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Ezh (capital , lowercase ) is a character in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative. ... Yona (pronounced , not ) is a village on the east coast of Guam. ...

Chamorro basic phrases

Numbers

Current common Chamorro uses only number words of Spanish origin: unu, dos, tres, etc. Old Chamorro used different number words based on categories: "Basic numbers" (for date, time, etc), "living things", "inanimate things", and "long objects". it is also similar to the Bisaya language which is found in the Philippines:

• The tens digit numbers starting from 10 is dies(10),benti(20),trenta(30),kuårenta(40),singkuenta(50),sisenta(60),sitenta(70),ochenta(80),nubenta(90)

The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

Further reading

• Aguon, K. B. (1995). Chamorro: a complete course of study. Agana, Guam: K.B. Aguon.
• Topping, D. M., & Ogo, P. (1969). Spoken Chamorro; an intensive language course with grammatical notes and glossary. Micronesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

External links

• Chamorro language at Ethnologue
• http://ns.gov.gu/language.html
• http://www.offisland.com/thelanguage.html
• http://www.chamorro.com/fino/fino.html
• http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Chamorro-english/