nounChamorro, Chamorros

• 1A member of the indigenous people of Guam.

  ‘Chamoru, the ancient language of the Chamorros on Guam, and English are both official languages in Guam.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Guam is a spiritual place where Chamorros believe in a vigorous spiritual presence melded with Catholic dogma taught by the earliest Spanish missionaries.’
  • ‘After the 1970s, ethnic tension between Chamorros and Filipinos became pronounced.’
  • ‘However, both patrilineal and cognatic systems are widespread in southeastern Asia, and the Chamorros did not move further into the Pacific.’
  • ‘Indigenous voices like those of the Chamorro of US-dominated Guam, or the Rapanui of Chilean-administered Easter Island, are seldom heard.’
  • ‘Guam's flying fox bats are a prized food of the Chamorro.’
  • ‘The spirits of Guam are not limited to Chamorro legend.’

• 2mass noun The Austronesian language of the Chamorro, with about 73,000 speakers.

  ‘The official languages are English, Chamorro, and Carolinian, an Eastern Malayo-Polynesian language that is a combination of dialects from atolls in the area of Truk.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Guam, or Guahan, (translated as ‘we have’) as it was known in the ancient Chamorro language, is the southernmost and largest island of the Mariana Islands, in the west central Pacific.’
  • ‘In the Chamorro language of the Northern Marianas, the greeting is hafa adai.’
  • ‘A while back, a coworker of mine who had been stationed in Guam while in the Air Force told me a surprising fact - the name of the island Guam is not, as one would expect, a Chamorro word.’