Home > Austronesian languages

The name comes from the Greek word Austronesia, meaning "southern islands".

The Formosan languages are spoken on the island of Taiwan, and some neighbouring islands. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are scattered across the huge area described above. The Malayo-Polynesian (MP) languages are divided into two major subgroups, the Western MP and the Central-Eastern MP. Western has 300 million speakers; Eastern has about 1 million speakers.

Comparative reconstruction, confirmed by archaeology, has shown that the original homeland of the linguistic ancestors of all these languages was in south-eastern China, from which they emigrated to the island of Taiwan. On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are among families of native Formosan languages. The older term 'Malayo-Polynesian' is sometimes still used for the entire non-Taiwanese branch of Austronesian.

Some linguists believe the Tai languages probably deserve a place within an expanded version of this family, though others favor the Sino-Tibetan family to include them. Yet others have attempted to show a genetic relationship between Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages, forming an AustricThe Austric language superfamily is a large grouping of languages primarily spoken in South East Asia and the Pacific. It includes the Austronesian language family of the Pacific and Madagascar, as well as the Austroasiatic language family of mainland Sou superfamily. Neither the Austro-Tai, nor the Austric superfamilies have gained general acceptance in the linguistic community.

The Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word) to express the plural, and all Austronesian languages have a low entropyEntropy is when the transactional nature of the universe ceases due to the "equality" of everything.; that is, the text is quite repetitive in terms of the frequency of sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number.

1 Languages

• JavaneseJavanese language is the spoken language of people in central and eastern part of island of Java, in Indonesia. According to Ethnologue, it is spoken by approximately 75,500,000 people. The Javanese language is part of the Malayo-Polynesian (or Austronesi (>80 million)
• IndonesianIndonesian is the official language of Indonesia and a remarkable language in several ways. To begin with, only a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Indonesia speak it as a mother tongue; for most people it is a second language. In a certain sense it is (35 million native speakers)
• TagalogTagalog is one of the major languages of the Republic of the Philippines. Being part of the Austronesian languages, it is related to Indonesian, Malay, Fijian, Maori, Hawaiian, Malagasy, Samoan, Tahitian, Chamorro, Tetum, and the Austronesian languages of (22 million native)
• MalayMalay people Malay can mean: The Malay language From or related to Malaysia Malay people See also Cape Malays, Malay nationalism Communes that begin with Malay in Yonne, France, Malay-le-Grand and Malay-le-Petit. (7-18 million native)
• Ilokano (7 million native)
• Cebuano (18 million native)
• Malagasy (10 million)
• Fijian (337,000)
• Samoan (200,000? but many speak English also)
• Maori (160,000 but nearly all speak English also)
• Tongan (108,000)
• Hawaiian
• Gilbertese (Kiribati) (100,000)
• Marshallese
• Mangaabe-Mbula
• Paiwan
• Bantik
• It is theorized by some linguists that Japanese is either a member of or has been heavily influenced by the Austronesian language family.