- Official language in
- Guam, Northern Mariana Islands
- Script
- Latin
- Speakers
- 23K (2010)
Where it's spoken
Chamorro is an official language of Guam, alongside English. It is also an official language of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), alongside Carolinian and English. Guam and the CNMI are separate U.S. jurisdictions: Guam is an unincorporated U.S. territory, while the remaining islands of the Marianas form the CNMI. Chamorro has the largest number of speakers of any indigenous language of Micronesia, but has also been called one of Micronesia's most endangered languages.
Sources
- Guam Code Annotated, Title 1 (General Provisions), Chapter 7 (Construction of this Code) — Compiler of Laws, Judiciary of Guam — § 706, Official Languages
- Constitution of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — CNMI Law Revision Commission — Article XXII (Official Seal, Flag and Languages), Section 3 (Official Language)
- Rechebei, Elizabeth D.; Chung, Sandra (2018). "Chamorro Language Revitalization in the CNMI and Guam." In Salvatore Cassar (ed.), Cultural Heritage Care and Management: Theory and Practice, pp. 83–94, Rowman & Littlefield (chapter draft hosted by Inetnun Kutturan Natibun Marianas) — p. 1
Script & pronunciation
Chamorro is written in the Latin alphabet. Two official spelling systems exist side by side — one adopted in Guam and later revised, the other adopted in the CNMI — and they use the same letters but sometimes spell the same word differently. Both write the low back vowel with a ring over the letter a, as in å, to distinguish it from plain a; both write the palatal nasal with a tilde over n, as in ñ, a convention inherited from the Spanish colonial period; and both write the glottal stop with an apostrophe. This app's cards use these letters, as in Håfa Adai ("hello"), Si Yu'os Ma'åse' ("thank you"), and båñu ("bathroom").
Sources
- Chung, Sandra (2020). Chamorro Grammar. Santa Cruz, California (open access via eScholarship, University of California) — §29.2, "Spelling: basics" (pp. 645–646)
Grammar essentials
Chamorro is a predicate-first language: in a neutral sentence, the predicate is stated first, followed by its subject and any object. When the predicate is a noun or a preposition, this order is fixed, as in this app's card Månu na lugåt i tenda siha? ("Where is the local market?"), where the predicate "which place" comes first and the subject "the stores" follows. Sentence negation is formed with the word ti ("not"), placed at the very beginning of the clause, before any tense-aspect-mood marker and the predicate itself. This app's card Ti siña yo' kuentos CHamoru ("I can't speak Chamorro") shows this: ti precedes siña ("can"), and the subject yo' ("I") immediately follows siña, one of the word orders this auxiliary allows.
Sources
- Chung, Sandra (2020). Chamorro Grammar. Santa Cruz, California (open access via eScholarship, University of California) — §3.4, "Word order" (p. 61) and §3.4.1.2 (p. 64); §4.1, "Negation, tense-aspect-mood, and word order" (pp. 69–70); Chapter 17, "Negation" (p. 371)
Politeness & etiquette
Chamorro marks respect for elders with a title that differs by the elder's gender and precedes the elder's name: Tun for a man and Tan for a woman. Requests and imperatives can also be softened with the particle fan ("please"), which is placed right after the word carrying the predicate or at the end of the clause.
Sources
- Chung, Sandra (2020). Chamorro Grammar. Santa Cruz, California (open access via eScholarship, University of California) — §6.1.2, table "Terms of respect for elders" (p. 114); §18.3, "the politeness particle fan" (p. 398)