The Chamorro language across islands and generations

How does the Chamorro language differ across islands and across generations? Everyone knows there are differences in the Chamorro words people know and how they pronounce them, but what about the grammar? In this presentation, we talk about some of our recent psycholinguistic experiments on Saipan, Tinian and Rota. In these experiments, we investigated how people understand relative clauses. Unlike English, which has only one word order for relative clauses, Chamorro has three. This makes Chamorro a good language for investigating how speakers comprehend complex sentences. Our results reveal some interesting linguistic differences across the three islands, but they also show that speakers’ ability to understand relative clauses is fully maintained across the generations. Finally, we ask for the community’s help in identifying other differences in Chamorro grammar that we could investigate.