Micronesia

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This article is about the greater region. For the independent state, see Federated States of Micronesia.

Image:Micronesia-large.png

Micronesia, from the ancient Greek μικρος (small) and νησος (island), is the name of a region in the Pacific Ocean. The Philippines lie to the west, Indonesia to the south west, Papua New Guinea and Melanesia to the south, and Polynesia to the south-east and east.

1 Geography and history
2 Languages
3 In Pop Culture
4 References
5 External links
6 Schools

[edit] Geography and history

This region of Oceania consists of many hundreds of small islands 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 between eight territories:

the Federated States of Micronesia (sometimes referred to simply as "Micronesia", or alternatively abbreviated "FSM" [[which are 4 state: Kosrae, Yap, Pohnpei, Chuuk);
the Republic of the Marshall Islands;
the Republic of Palau;
the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands;
the Republic of Nauru;
the Republic of Kiribati;
the Territory of Guam.
the Territory of Wake Island.

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 on by the Spanish. Full European expansion did not come, however, until the late 19th century, when the area would be divided between:

the United States, which took control of Guam during the Spanish-American War of 1898, and colonized Wake Island;
Germany, which took Nauru and bought the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands from Spain; and
the British Empire, which took the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati).

During the First World War, Germany's Pacific island territories were taken from it and were made into League of Nations Mandates. Nauru became an Australian 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 are a U.S. Commonwealth) are independent states.

[edit] 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:

Chamorro and Tanapag in the Mariana Islands,
Yapese and Outer Islands's language as Ulithian, Woleian and Satawalese in the Federated States of Micronesia, and
Palauan in Palau.

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.

[edit] In Pop Culture

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You can help Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations. This article has been tagged since December 2006.

On The West Wing season one, episode "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics," President Bartlet informs his staff about Micronesia "It’s actually 607 small islands in the South Pacific. Interestingly, while its total land mass is only 270 square miles, it occupies more than a million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. Population is 127,000 and the U.S. Embassy is located in the state of Pohnpei and not, as many people believe, on the island of Yap."
Also, in that same episode, Donna mentions that Micronesia has some of the best scuba diving in the world.
In numerous Godzilla films it is the district or region wherein the reptilian behemoth is found to be slumbering in a dormant state.
In the Discovery Kids series Flight 29 Down, a group of teenagers return from a trip to Micronesia and are then stuck on a deserted island after their plane crashes.
One season of popular reality show 'Survivor' was shot on a small island in The Republic of Palau.
On the Simpsons episode Missionary: Impossible Homer went on a mission trip there to hide from PBS

[edit] References

Kirch, Patrick Vinton (2000). On the Road of the Winds. An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact. University of California Press, pp. 166-167. ISBN 0-520-22347-0.

[edit] External links

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