The Polynesian Culture Area

The idea of Polynesia dates to the European Enlightenment, an outcome of the great voyages of Pacific exploration by such famous navigators as Louis de Bougainville, James Cook, George Vancouver and La Pérouse. The first use of the word (derived from the Greek words for “many” and “island”) is attributed to Charles De Brosses, in his 1756 Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, where he applied it to all of the islands of the “Great South Sea.” This inclusive definition was later supplanted by the term Oceania. The French explorer Dumont d’Urville in 1832 distinguished Polynesia from Melanesia, the islands of the Southwest Pacific from New Guinea to Fiji, and from Micronesia, islands north of the equator ranging from the Marianas and Palau in the west to the Marshall Islands in the east. Polynesia is typically conceptualised as the islands found within a vast triangle defined by Hawai’i in the North Pacific, New Zealand in the southwest and Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the far southeast. In addition to the Polynesian Triangle proper, however, another eighteen societies whose people speak Polynesian languages are scattered on generally small islands in Melanesia and Micronesia; these are referred to as the Polynesian Outliers.

Unlike either Melanesia or Micronesia, Polynesia forms a coherent region in terms of the linguistic and biological relationships of its populations. Historical linguistic studies confirm that the thirty-six documented Polynesian languages form a single lower-order branch of the vast Austronesian language family (Kirch & Green 2001). All of the Polynesian languages can be traced back to a Proto-Polynesian language interstage, for which more than four thousand words have now been reconstructed. As biological populations, the Polynesian islanders exhibit considerable phenotypic homogeneity and common genetic markers, including a distinctive nine-base pair deletion in mtDNA, sometimes called the “Polynesian motif”.