THE HISTORY OF POLYNESIAN SETTLEMENT IN THE REEF AND DUFF ISLANDS: THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE

This article summarises some of the results of a research project undertaken at the University of Oslo. The project’s purpose was the documentation and description of the two languages spoken in the Reef Islands, and the study of language contact there. One of these languages is the Polynesian outlier Vaeakau-Taumako (Pileni), spoken in the Outer Reef Islands as well as in the Duff Islands located some 100km northeast of the Reefs. In this article we present a likely scenario for the settlement history of the Polynesian population in the Reef and Duff Islands, based on linguistic evidence, primarily place names and the likely structural effects of language contact, and on evidence from oral traditions in the form of narratives recorded in the islands. These are drawn from a corpus of data, including recorded narratives, elicited sentences and handwritten texts, collected in Vaeakau (Reef Islands) and Taumako (Duff Islands) during several periods of field research between 1997 and 2005.