The indigenous languages spoken in the Marquesan archipelago of French Polynesia belong to the Eastern Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Within the Eastern Oceanic branch, the Marquesan vernaculars belong to the Proto-Central-Eastern subgroup of Proto-Eastern Polynesian which is itself a subgroup of Proto-Central Pacific […]. Geographically, linguistically and, to some degree, also culturally two distinct groups are generally distinguished in the Marquesan archipelago: the northwest and the southeast Marquesas.