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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. It is on par with Indo-European and Uralic as one of the best established ancient language families. The name Austronesian comes from Latin auster "south wind" plus Greek nêsos "island". The family is aptly named as the vast majority of Austronesian languages are spoken on islands: only a few languages, such as Malay and the Chamic languages, are autochthonous to mainland Asia. There is legitimate debate among linguists as to which language family comprises the largest number of languages. Austronesian is clearly one candidate, with 1268 (according to Ethnologue), or roughly one-fifth of the known languages of the world. The geographical span of the homelands of its languages is also among the widest, ranging from Madagascar to Easter Island. 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 Taiwan. The Formosan languages of Taiwan are grouped into as many as nine first-order subgroups of Austronesian. All Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan (including its offshore Yami language) belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch, sometimes called Extra-Formosan.
Homeland 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 , the Formosan languages form nine of the ten primary branches of the Austronesian language family. Comrie (2001:28) noted this when he wrote: 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 that of the least. While some scholars suspect that the number of principal branches among the Formosan languages may be somewhat less than Blust's estimate of nine (e.g. Li 2006), there is little contention among linguists with this analysis and the resulting view of the origin and direction of the migration. Peiros|2004}}. To get an idea of the original homeland of the Austronesian people, scholars can probe evidence from archaeology and genetics. Studies from the science of genetics have produced conflicting outcomes. Some researchers find evidence for a proto-Austronesian homeland on the Asian mainland (e.g., Melton et al., 1998), while others mirror the linguistic research, rejecting an East Asian origin in favor of Taiwan (e.g., Trejaut et al., 2005). Archaeological evidence (e.g., ) is more consistent, suggesting 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 millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages . It is believed that this migration began around 6,000 years ago . 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 (2004:8) states: Linguistic analysis of the Proto-Austronesian language stops at the western shores of Taiwan; the related mainland language(s) have not survived. Thurgood|1999|p=225}}. Distant relations 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.
Structure It is very difficult to make meaningful generalizations about the languages that make up a family as rich and diverse as Austronesian. Speaking very broadly, the Austronesian languages can be divided into three groups of languages: Philippine-type languages, Indonesian-type languages and post-Indonesian type (Ross 2002). The first group is characterized by relatively strong verb-initial word order and Philippine-type voice alternations. This phenomenon has frequently been referred to as focus. However, the relevant literature is beginning to disprefer this term. Many linguists feel that the phenomena is better described as voice, and that the terminology creates confusion with more common uses of the word focus within linguistics. 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. Major languages Languages with at least 4 million native speakers Official languages Classification 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 The seminal article regarding the subgroupings of Formosan (and by extension, the top-level structure of Austronesian) is . His proposed grouping was certainly not the first. In fact, he lists no less than seventeen others, discussing some of their features. Prominent Formosanists (linguists who specialize in Formosan languages) take issue with some of its details. However, it remains the point of reference for current linguistic analyses. Note that the first nine primary branches of Austronesian are composed entirely of Formosan languages: Austronesian Formosan classification II Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian classification Quotations to . Malayo-Polynesian See also Further reading | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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