• Comparison

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 Taiwanese (Formosan) languages (unrelated to Chinese). 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.

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 entropy; 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.

Languages

• Javanese (>80 million)
• Indonesian (35 million native speakers)
• Tagalog (24 million native)
• Ilocano (9 million native)
• Cebuano (24 million native)
• Malagasy (10 million)
• Fijian (337,000)
• Tongan (108,000)
• Maori (100,000)
• Hawaiian language
• Gilbertese (Kiribati) (67,000)
• Marshallese
• Paiwan

• Ethnologue report for Austronesian.