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Austronesian languages

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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). 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".

Comparative reconstruction, confirmed by archaeology and Chinese records, suggests that the homeland of the linguistic ancestors of these languages was in eastern to south-eastern China, from Shandong through Fujian, from where they migrated to the island of Taiwan several millennia ago. On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native Formosan languages; none of the mainland languages have survived. (Modern mainland languages such as Cham are more recent migrants.)

Contents

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.

Roger Blench 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.

Structure

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 native speakers
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)

    • 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

    (arranged approximately north to south)

    Austronesian

    Formosan classification II

    Austronesian

    Malayo-Polynesian classification

    Following Wouk & Ross (2002)

    Malayo-Polynesian

    References

    External links

    Bibliography

    [[zh-min-nan:Lâm-tó gí-hē]]

     

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