After decades of linguistic influence from Spanish, German, Japanese, and
English, modern-day Palauan contains syntactic, semantic, and phonological references
to all four languages. The sociolinguistic situation of Palau seems typical to that ofmany
post-colonial nations: a once-administrative language is now an official high language,
while the historically indigenous language is a low language. In Palau, however, within a
50-year span, one official high language, Japanese, has been completely replaced by
another, English. Palauans born in or before the World War II generation are JapanesePalauan
bilinguals, but since the post-1946 era of American occupation, Japanese fluency
and competency has rapidly diminished. Many middle aged Palauans are semi-competent
Japanese speakers, while younger Palauans are mainly English-Palauan bilinguals, and
formal L2 Japanese learners. Linguistic remnants ofthe Japanese period remain however,
and there is heavy lexical borrowing from Japanese into the Palauan of all speakers.
However, English has, for the most part, replaced Japanese as the official language of
Palau, and as the language of formal institutions like law and education. The purpose of
this paper is to assess the linguistic interplay ofJapanese, English, and Palauan within the
island of Palau, and present the lexical, semantic, morphological, phonological, and
syntactic effects ofthe two non-indigenous majority languages on Palauan. The proposal
is a historical study of rapid language change and contact, and hopes to present a simple
but thorough account of major contact-induced theories about Palauan, such as the status
of Palauan word order and non-native phonological innovation. I The paper is organized
as follows. Section 2 presents a concise history of linguistic contact in Palau. Section 3
presents the issue of Palauan underlying word order. Section 4 discusses Palauan
phonological innovation. In Section 5, the semantic modification of borrowings intoPalauan is analyzed. Section 6 presents evidence of the linguistic influence of Spanish
and German on Palauan. The Palauan vocalic system is discussed in Section 7, the
consonantal system in Section 8, and morphology in Section 9. In Section 10, the paper is
summarized. There are two appendices.