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Melanesia is the great arc of islands located north and east of Australia and south of the Equator. The name derives the Greek words melas ('black') and nēsos ('island') for the predominantly dark-skinned peoples of New Guinea island, the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), New Caledonia, and Fiji.
Oceania is generally considered the least decolonized region in the world. In his 1993 book France and the South Pacific since 1940, Robert Aldrich commented: . With the ending of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands became a 'commonwealth' of the United States, and the new republics of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia signed ...
Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family. Polynesian languages show a considerable degree of similarity. The vowels are generally the same—/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, pronounced as in Italian, Spanish, and German—and the consonants are always followed by a vowel.
Micronesian culture is very diverse across island atolls [39] and influenced by the surrounding cultures. In the east one finds a more Polynesian culture with social classes (nobility, commoners and slaves) and in the west a more Melanesian-Indonesian influenced culture led by tribal chiefs without nobility, with the Marianas being an exception.
Oceania is commonly divided into four geographic sub-regions, characterized by shared cultural, religious, linguistic, and ethnic traits: Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Most Oceanian countries are multi-party representative parliamentary democracies , and tourism is a large source of income for the Pacific Islands nations.
Analysis by Kayser et al. (2008) found that only 21% of the Polynesian autosomal gene pool is of Australo-Melanesian origin, with the remaining 79% being of Austronesian origin. [23] Another study by Friedlaender et al. (2008) also confirmed that some Polynesians are genetically closer to Micronesians , Taiwanese Aborigines , and Islander ...
The Rotumans (Rotuman: Rotuạm; Fijian: Ro) are a Polynesian ethnic group native to Rotuma, an island group forming part of Fiji. [4] The island itself is a cultural melting pot at the crossroads of the Micronesian, Melanesian and Polynesian divisions of the Pacific Ocean, and due to the seafaring nature of traditional Pacific cultures, the indigenous Rotuman have adopted or share many ...
The region commonly termed "Polynesia" includes thousands of islands, most of them arranged in a rough triangle bounded by Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand.Outside this Polynesian Triangle, in areas commonly designated Micronesia and Melanesia, lie about two dozen islands, most of them small and remote, whose inhabitants speak Polynesian languages.