My main helper these days has lived and worked in the US for many years, but he’s a native of Fiji. I call him Isaac in my postings, but his actual personal name is the Fijian version of the name, Aisake, and the syntax of his native language Fijian turns out to have lots of characteristics that are a surprise to, say, speakers of English. So I offer you some notes on the language, building on the material in the Wikipedia article on the language.
The Fijian islands in Oceania; Fiji is an archipelago of many islands, with Tonga (also an assemblage of islands) as its closest neighbor
The article’s introductory notes:
Fijian is an Austronesian language of the Malayo-Polynesian family spoken by some 350,000–450,000 ethnic Fijians as a native language. In the 2013 Constitution, Fijian (referred to as iTaukei) is an official language of Fiji, along with English and Fiji Hindi and there is discussion about establishing it as the “national language”. Fijian is a VOS language
… Linguistic research on the relationship between the Fijian and Polynesian languages shows that they are not simply a case of one borrowing from the other. Instead, they are part of the same language subgroup, the Central Pacific branch of the Austronesian language family, sharing a common ancestor. This means that a large portion of their shared vocabulary consists of cognates — words with a common origin since the vast majority of similarities come from this shared linguistic heritage. However, it is also true that some words from Polynesia have been adopted into Fijian especially from Tonga, particularly in the eastern dialects.
Now four characteristics of Fijian syntax.
Fijian characteristics: VOS as the dominant word order. Within a clause, the dominant order in Fijian is: verb – object – subject. A minority option in the world’s languages, most of which have S before O: in the most common type, SOV (as in Japanese and Turkish); and the next most common, SVO (as in English, French, and Swahili). Signficantly rarer is VSO (as in Irish and Welsh). Of the still rarer languages with O before S, the Fijian type, VOS is the most common, with OVS and OSV quite rare.
Fijian characteristics: tons of pronouns. From the Wikipedia article:
The pronominal system of Fijian is remarkably rich. Like many other languages, it recognises three persons; first person (speaker), second person (addressee), and third person (all other). There is no distinction between human, non-human, animate, or inanimate. Four numbers are represented; singular, dual, paucal, and plural — ‘paucal’ refers to more than two people who have some relationship, as a family or work group; if none, ‘plural’ is used. Like many other Oceanic languages, Fijian pronouns are marked for number and clusivity [1INCLUSIVE, speaker + addressee (‘me and you’); 1EXCLUSIVE , speaker alone (‘me but not you’)]
[There’s also a subject vs. object case distinction.]
Fijian characteristics: alienable vs. inalienable possession. From the Wikipedia article:
Free nouns can stand alone and need no affix; most nouns in Fijian fall into this class. Bound nouns require a suffix to complete them and are written ending in a hyphen to indicate this requirement. Tama- ‘father’ and tina- ‘mother’ are examples of bound nouns. The classes of free and bound nouns roughly correspond with the concept, common in Austronesian languages, of alienable and inalienable possession, respectively. Alienable possession denotes a relationship in which the thing possessed is not culturally considered an inherent part of the possessor, and inalienable possession indicates a relationship in which the possessed is regarded as an intrinsic part of the possessor.
Body parts and kin relations are typical examples of inalienable possession. Inanimate objects are typical examples of alienable possession.
In my 7/27/18 posting “Are you my bottom?”, there’s material on alienable vs. inalienable possession: a bottom as a bodypart vs. a bottom as something owned or controlled.
Fijian characteristics: nominal classifiers. From the Wikipedia article:
The alienable nature of free nouns is further marked by prefixes, known as classifiers, indicating certain other characteristics. Some common examples are me- when the possessed noun is something drinkable, ke- (or ꞌe) when the noun is something edible and we- when the referent of the possessed noun is personal property.
Now from a different Wikipedia article:
A classifier … is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to “classify” a noun depending on some characteristics (e.g. humanness, animacy, sex, shape, social status [also: stuff (mass) vs. things (count), age, food, drink, species, animal, plant, vehicle, …]) of its referent.
… In languages that have classifiers, they are often used when the noun is being counted, that is, when it appears with a numeral. In such languages, a phrase such as “three people” is often required to be expressed as “three X (of) people”, where X is a classifier appropriate to the noun for “people” [glossable as HUMAN: “three HUMAN (of) children”, for example]; compare to “three blades of grass”.
In language with classifiers, a system of (conceptual) categorization is overt — marked in the classifiers. But such systems of classification are often covert, showing up in the syntax associated with classified nouns, as in the different syntax of English mass nouns and count nouns or the different syntax of animal nouns (two pigs / horses) and animal-meat nouns (roast pork / horse).
March 10, 2026 at 1:12 pm |
I was a graduate student in Hawaii when there was an enormous Pacific languages project. Al Schutz was a colleague, and Paul Geraghty wrote his dissertation on Fijian, and now lives there. I have a record of Fijian folk songs that I haven’t played in ages–need to hear Ko Bau and Isa Lei…