Morphology
Nouns, adjectives and verbs are not inflected. Grammatical functions are performed by affixes (prefixes and suffixes).
Nominal
Proper names, which include personal names, place names and personal pronouns, are preceded by the article ko; common nouns are preceded by the article na.
Personal pronouns (shown in the table) distinguish four persons and four numbers (singular, dual, paucal [a small number greater than two], and plural. The first person can be inclusive (of speaker and hearer) or exclusive (the speaker is included but not the hearer). Subject pronouns are always obligatory and must be included in every predicate.
| sing. | dual | paucal | plural | |
| 1st. incl. | — | xetaaru | xetaou | xeta |
| 1st. excl. | yau | xeruqa | xeitou | keimami |
| 2nd. | iko | kemudruxa | xemutou | xemuni |
| 3rd | xoya | druxa | dro’ou | ira |
Buan Fijian, like other Oceanic languages, distinguishes different types of relations to express possession:
- Inalienable possession includes family relations, parts of the body and other relations between whole and part. It is indicated by attaching a pronominal possessive suffix directly to the noun:
a ama-qu (my father)
a: article for common names
ama: father
qu: possessive marker for the 1st person singular
- Edibles and some inherent properties like length and height. In this kind of possession the possessive suffix is not attached to the noun but to the base ke-:
a ke-qu bia (‘my manioc’)
- Drinkables. The possessive suffix is attached to the base me-:
a me-qu tī (‘my tea’)
- All other types of relations are marked by the possessive suffix attached to the base no-:
a no-qu vale (‘my house’)
Syntax
The normal word order is Verb phrase-Object-Subject (VOS):
dro’ou tiva a yalewa a gone
The children saw the woman
dro: 3rd pl. pronoun
ou: past tense marker
tiva: verbal stem
a: transitive marker
yalewa: woman
gone: child
The plural of ‘child’ is marked directly through the personal pronoun.
Word order can also be VSO. Attributes follow their nouns. Fijian has a few prepositions.
© 2013 Alejandro Gutman and Beatriz Avanzati