When you listen to native speakers, have you ever heard them say really small words like po or bu, but couldn’t find them in the dictionaries or grammar books? These tiny words are examples of how native speakers often shorten future markers and pronouns, blending them together to speak more quickly and naturally.

I was recently reminded of how challenging these colloquial shortcuts are for learners, when Jay and I were talking to our måli’. We can hear these shortcuts everywhere in native speech, but it’s typically only the “full” forms of future tense statements that are taught in books and classroom environments. This is why these shortcuts can be challenging for learners to recognize. In this post, we’ll unpack these common shortcuts so you can better recognize and understand them in Chamorro songs and real conversations.

If you want to skip directly to the summary table of shortcuts, click here. Otherwise, click Continue Reading to start with a brief introduction to future markers in Chamorro. Happy studying!

Contents

1. A Brief Introduction to Future Markers
2. Table of Future Marker Shortcuts

A Brief Introduction to Future Markers

In Chamorro, we use future markers to make future tense statements. Future markers are just words indicating that something will happen.

These future markers are used with Hu Type Pronouns, and the type of future marker we use is determined by our pronoun. This creates different combinations of future markers and pronouns.

A full table of these future marker and pronoun combinations can be found in Lesson 15: Talking in Future Tense.

These combinations of future markers and pronouns consist of words that are already very small. But native speakers often shorten and blend these words even further so they can speak faster. That’s where the really small words like po or bu come from – they are colloquial speaking shortcuts that don’t always show up in instructional texts.

Table of Future Marker Shortcuts

To get us started with these shortcuts, here is a table of some different ways that future markers and pronouns can be shortened and/or contracted together. The “full” form is shown in the left-most column, the shortcuts are shown in the middle column, and the English translation is in the far-right column.

Full	Shortcut	English
para	pa’	will
para ta	pa’ ta,	we will (inclusive)
para un	pon	you (1) will
ya un	yon	you (1) will
para bai in	bei in, bein	we will (exclusive)
para u	po, u	he/she/it will
para bai hu	para bai, bai, bei, pabu, bu	I will

This table represents the shortcuts I have heard in conversations with native speakers or in Chamorro music. It may not be an exhaustive list, but it can help you get started in recognizing these forms.