Austronesian languages
The
Austronesian languages are a
language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of
Southeast Asia and the
Pacific (with a few members spoken on continental
Asia).
Hawaiian,
Rapanui, and
Malagasy (spoken on
Madagascar) are the geographic outliers of the Austronesian family. Austronesian has several primary branches, all but one of which are found exclusively on
Formosa (mainland
Taiwan: the
Formosan languages, which are unrelated to
Chinese). All Austronesian languages spoken outside Formosa, including the offshore
Yami language of Taiwan, belong to the
Malayo-Polynesian branch, sometimes called
Extra-Formosan.
Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, both in terms of number of languages (1268 according to
Ethnologue) and in terms of the geographical extent of the homelands of its languages (from
Madagascar to
Easter Island). It is also on par with
Indo-European and
Uralic as one of the best developed and most secure language family proposals. The name
Austronesian comes from the
Latin auster "south wind" plus the
Greek nêsos "island".
The protohistory of the Austronesian
people can be traced farther back through time than can that of the Proto-Austronesian language. From the standpoint of
historical linguistics, the home of the Austronesian languages is
Taiwan. On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native
Formosan languages. According to Blust (1999), the Formosan languages form nine of the ten primary branches of the Austronesian language family.
Comrie (2001:28) noted this when he wrote:
... the internal diversity among the... Formosan languages... is greater than that in all the rest of Austronesian put together, so there is a major genetic split within Austronesian between Formosan and the rest... Indeed, the genetic diversity within Formosan is so great that it may well consist of several primary branches of the overall Austronesian family.
At least since
Sapir (1968), linguists have generally accepted that the chronology of the dispersal of languages within a given language family can be traced from the area of greatest linguistic variety to the that of the least. While some scholars suspect that the number principal branches among the Formosan languages may be somewhat less than Blust's estimate of nine (e.g. Li 2006), there is no serious contention among linguists with the analysis of the origin and direction of the migration.
To get an idea of the original homeland of the Austronesian
people, scholars can probe evidence from archaeology (e.g., Bellwood 1997) and genetics . This evidence suggests that the ancestors of the Austronesians spread from the South Chinese mainland to Taiwan at some time around 8,000 years ago. Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that it is from this island that seafaring peoples migrated, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millenia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages (Diamond 2000). It is believed that this migration began around 6,000 years ago (Blust 1999). However, evidence from historical linguistics cannot bridge the gap between those two periods. The view that linguistic evidence connects Proto-Austronesian languages to the Sino-Tibetan ones, as proposed for example by Sagart (2002), is a minority view. As Fox (2004) states:
Implied in ...discussions of subgrouping [of Austronesian languages] is a broad consensus that the homeland of the Austronesians was in Taiwan. This homeland area may have also included the P'eng-hu (Pescadores) islands between Taiwan and China and possibly even sites on the coast of mainland China, especially if one were to view the early Austronesians as a population of related dialect communities living in scattered coastal settlements.
Linguistic analysis of the Proto-Austronesian language stops at the western shores of Taiwan; the related mainland language(s) have not survived. [The sole exception, a Chamic language, is a more recent migrant (Thurgood 1999:225)].
Genealogical links have been proposed between Austronesian and various families of
Southeast Asia in what is generally called an
Austric phylum. However, the only one of these proposals that conforms to the
comparative method is the "Austro-Tai" hypothesis, which links Austronesian to the
Tai-Kadai languages.
Roger Blench (2004:12) said about Austro-Tai that,
Ostapirat [in press] assumes a simple model of a primary split with Daic [Tai-Kadai] being the Austronesians who stayed at home. But this seems unlikely. Daic looks like a branch of proto-Philippines and does not share in the complexities of Formosan. It may be better to think of proto-Daic speakers migrating back across from the northern Philippines to the region of Hainan island; hence the distinctiveness of Hlai and Be, and Daic the result of radical restructuring following contact with Miao-Yao and Sinitic.
That is, in the classification below Tai-Kadai would be a branch of the Borneo-Philippines languages. However, none of these wider proposals have gained general acceptance in the linguistic community.
It has also been proposed that Japanese may be a distant relative of the Austronesian language family. The evidence for this is slight, and many linguists think it is more likely that Japanese was instead influenced by Austronesian languages, perhaps by an Austronesian substratum. Those who propose this scenario suggest that the Austronesian family once covered the islands to the north of Formosa (western Japanese areas such as the Ryukyu Islands and Kyushu) as well as to the south.
The Austronesian languages tend to use
reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word, such as
wiki-
wiki), and, like many
East and
Southeast Asian languages, have highly restrictive
phonotactics, with small numbers of
phonemes and predominantly consonant-vowel syllables.
Languages with native speakers
*Javanese (76 million)
*Malay (40 million native, 175 million total)
*Tagalog (22 million native, ~85 million total)
*Sundanese (27 million)
*Cebuano (19 million native)
*Malagasy (17 million)
*Madurese (14 million)
*Ilokano (8 million native)
*Hiligaynon (7 million)
*Minangkabau (7 million)
*Batak (6 million, all dialects)
*Banjar (4.5 million)
*Balinese (4 million)Official languages
*Indonesian Malay (23 million native, Indonesia)
*Tagalog (22 million native, ~85 million total, Philippines)
*Malaysian Malay (18 million native, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei)
*Malagasy (17 million, Madagascar)
*Tetum (800,000 speakers, East Timor)
*Fijian (350,000 native, 550,000 total, Fiji)
*Samoan (370,000, Samoa)
*Tahitian (120,000, French Polynesia)
*Tongan (108,000, Tonga)
*Gilbertese (68,000, Kiribati)
*Maori (100,000, New Zealand)
*Chamorro language (60,000, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands)
*Marshallese (> 44,000, Marshall Islands)
*Hawaiian (1000 native, 8000 competent, Hawaii)The internal structure of the Austronesian languages is difficult to work out, as the family consists of many very similar and very closely related languages with large numbers of
dialect continua, making it difficult to recognize boundaries between branches. In even the best classifications available today, many of the groups in the Philippines and Indonesia are geographic conveniences rather than reflections of relatedness. However, it is clear that the greatest genealogical diversity is found among the Formosan languages of Taiwan, and the least diversity among the islands of the Pacific, supporting a dispersal of the family from Taiwan or mainland China. Below is a consensus opinion of Malayo-Polynesian, with the Western Malayo-Polynesian classification based on Wouk & Ross (2002). The Formosan languages are listed both with and without subgrouping.
Formosan classification I
(arranged approximately north to south)
AustronesianSaisiyat*
Atayalic:
Atayal and
Sediq (
Taroko Gorge)
*
Kulunic:
Popora-
Hoanya,
Pazeh*
Thaoic:
Thao,
BabuzaBunun*
Amic: ,
Kavalan,
Basay,
Siraya*
Tsouic:
Tsou,
Kanakanabu,
SaaroaRukaiPuyumaPaiwan*
Malayo-Polynesian (see below)
Formosan classification II
Austronesian*
Atayalic *
Tsou-Malayo-Polynesian**
Rukai-Tsouic **
Paiwan-Malayo-Polynesian***
Paiwanic linkage: Amic, Bunun, Kulunic, Paiwan, Puyuma, Saisiyat, Thaoic
***
Malayo-Polynesian (see below)
Malayo-Polynesian classification
Following Wouk & Ross (2002)
Malayo-Polynesian *
Borneo-Philippines, or Outer Western Malayo-Polynesian (Outer Hesperonesian):
Many small groups of languages, with the most important languages being Tagalog, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Ilokano, Kapampangan, Malagasy*
Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian (possibly dispersed from Sulawesi)**
Sunda-Sulawesi, or Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian (Inner Hesperonesian):
Western Indonesia: Buginese (of Sulawesi), Acehnese, Cham (of Vietnam), Malay (Malaysian/Indonesian), Iban (of Borneo), Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese; also Chamorro (of Guam), Palauan**
Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian***
Central Malayo-Polynesian linkage, or Bandanesian:
Around the Banda Sea: Languages of Timor, Sumba, Flores, and the Malukus.
***
Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, or "Melanesian", if this term is redefined to subsume Micronesian and Polynesian
****
South Halmahera-Geelvink Bay:
Languages of Halmahera and western Irian Jaya, the most important being Buli and Biak****
Oceanic:
A well-supported family that includes all the Austronesian languages of Melanesia from Jayapura east, Polynesia, and most of Micronesia*Fay Wouk and
Malcolm Ross (ed.),
The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Australian National University, 2002.
*
Lynch, John,
Malcolm Ross and
Terry Crowley,
The Oceanic languages. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002.
*
Ethnologue report for Austronesian.*
Basic vocabulary database for 350 Austronesian Languages.*
Austronesian Language Resources (
defunct? moved?) (
@ archive.org)
*
* Bellwood, Peter. (1997) Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
*
* Blench, Roger (2004).
Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology? (PDF) Paper for the Symposium : Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan: genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence. Geneva, June 10-13.
*
* Blust, R. (1999). Subgrouping, circularity and extinction: some issues in Austronesian comparative linguistics. In E. Zeitoun & P.J.K Li (Eds.), Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 31-94. Taipei: Academia Sinica.
* Comrie, Bernard. (2001). Languages of the world. In Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller, eds.: The Handbook of Linguistics, 19-42. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Diamond, Jared M. (2000).
Taiwan's gift to the world. (PDF) Nature 403:709-710.
* Fox, James J. (2004).
Current Developments in Comparative Austronesian Studies (PDF). Paper prepared for Symposium Austronesia Pascasarjana Linguististik dan Kajian Budaya. Universitas Udayana, Bali 19-20 August.
* Li, Paul Jen-kuei. (2006).
The Internal Relationships of Formosan Languages (PDF). Paper presented at Tenth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (ICAL). 17-20 January 2006. Puerto Princesa City, Palawan, Philippines.
* Sagart, Laurent. (2002).
Sino-Tibeto-Austronesian: An updated and improved argument (PDF). Paper presented at Ninth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (ICAL9). 8-11 January 2002. Canberra, Australia.
* Sapir, Edward. (1968). Time perspective in aboriginal American culture: a study in method. In Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture and personality (D.G. Mandelbaum ed.), 389- 467. Berkeley: University of California Press.
* Thurgood, Graham. (1999). From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects. Two Thousand Years of LanguageContact and Change. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications No. 28. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
