Information AboutMicronesia |
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Micronesia, from the Greek ''mikros'' (μικρός) (meaning ''small'') and ''nesos'' (νῆσος) (meaning ''island''), is a Subregion of Oceania , comprising hundreds of small Island s in the Pacific Ocean . The Philippines lie to the northwest, Indonesia , Papua New Guinea and Melanesia to the west and southwest, and Polynesia to the east. GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY This region consists of many hundreds of small Island s spread over a large region of the western Pacific. The only empire known to have originated in Micronesia was based in Yap . The term "Micronesia" was first proposed to distinguish the region in 1831 by Jules Dumont D'Urville ; before this the term "Polynesia" was in use to generally describe the islands of the Pacific. Politically, Micronesia is divided into eight nation-states and territories:
Much of the area was to come under European domination quite early. Guam , the Northern Marianas , and the Caroline Islands (what would later become the FSM and Palau) were colonized early by the Spanish. These island territories were part of the Spanish East Indies and governed from Spanish Philippines since the early 17th century until 1898. Full European expansion did not come, however, until the early 20th century, when the area would be divided between:
During the First World War , Germany's Pacific island territories were taken from it and were made into League Of Nations Mandate s. Nauru became an Australia n mandate, while Germany's other territories were given as mandates to Japan . This remained the situation until Japan's defeat in the Second World War, when its mandates became a United Nations Trusteeship ruled by the United States, the Trust Territory Of The Pacific Islands . Today, all of Micronesia (with the exceptions of Guam and Wake Island, which are U.S. territories, and the Northern Mariana Islands, which is a U.S. Commonwealth) are independent states. LANGUAGES The native languages of the various Micronesian Indigenous Peoples are classified under the Austronesian Language family. Almost all of these languages belong to the Oceanic subgroup of this family; however, three exceptions are noted in Western Micronesia, which belong to the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroup:
This latter subgroup also includes most languages spoken today in the Philippines , Malaysia , and Indonesia (Kirch, 2000: pp. 166-167). On the eastern edge of the Federated States of Micronesia, the languages Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi represent an extreme westward extension of Polynesian . REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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