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    The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) Language Family

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    Sándor Tóth
    The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, comprising over 1,200 languages spoken across a wide geographic region from Madagascar to Easter Island. It is estimated the languages diverged from a common ancestor over 4,000 years ago. The family is divided into the Malayo-Polynesian and Formosan branches, with Malayo-Polynesian further divided into Western and Central-Eastern subgroups. Major languages include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Javanese, and Samoan, with a total of over 300 million speakers, though many smaller languages are endangered or extinct.

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    The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) Language Family

    Uploaded by

    Sándor Tóth
    289 views3 pages
    The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, comprising over 1,200 languages spoken across a wide geographic region from Madagascar to Easter Island. It is estimated the languages diverged from a common ancestor over 4,000 years ago. The family is divided into the Malayo-Polynesian and Formosan branches, with Malayo-Polynesian further divided into Western and Central-Eastern subgroups. Major languages include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Javanese, and Samoan, with a total of over 300 million speakers, though many smaller languages are endangered or extinct.

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    the austronesian (malayo-polynesian) language family

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    The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, comprising over 1,200 languages spoken across a wide geographic region from Madagascar to Easter Island. It is estimated the languages diverged from a common ancestor over 4,000 years ago. The family is divided into the Malayo-Polynesian and Formosan branches, with Malayo-Polynesian further divided into Western and Central-Eastern subgroups. Major languages include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Javanese, and Samoan, with a total of over 300 million speakers, though many smaller languages are endangered or extinct.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    289 views3 pages

    The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) Language Family

    Uploaded by

    Sándor Tóth
    The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, comprising over 1,200 languages spoken across a wide geographic region from Madagascar to Easter Island. It is estimated the languages diverged from a common ancestor over 4,000 years ago. The family is divided into the Malayo-Polynesian and Formosan branches, with Malayo-Polynesian further divided into Western and Central-Eastern subgroups. Major languages include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Javanese, and Samoan, with a total of over 300 million speakers, though many smaller languages are endangered or extinct.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
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    The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) Language Family

    introductionstructurewritingresources

    Introduction
    Overview and history

    The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family covers a wide geographic


    area, from Madagascar to Easter Island, and from Taiwan and Hawai'i to New
    Zealand. This geographic spread is the reason why this family of languages is
    alternatively called Malayo-Polynesian. Austronesian is one of the largest language
    families in the world, both in terms of the number of languages (1244) and in terms of
    its geographical extent.

    Austronesian languages are spoken by approximately 300 million people in


    Madagascar, the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia and New Guinea, the Philippines,
    Taiwan, the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian islands, and New Zealand.
    Today four Malayo-Polynesian languages have official status in four countries. These
    languages are widely spoken and understood as native or as second languages in their
    respective countries.

    • Malagasy, in Madagascar
    • Malay, in Malaysia
    • Indonesian (also called Bahasa Indonesia, a language based on Malay), in
    Indonesia
    • Pilipino (based on Tagalog), in the Philippines.

    Despite extensive research into Austronesian languages in the past several decades,
    their origin and early history remain largely unknown. Several competing theories of
    classification remain a matter of controversy to this day. Because there are many
    structural differences between the Austronesian languages, linguists estimate that they
    must have split from their common ancestor 4,000 or more years ago.
    It is thought that the original Proto-Malayo-Polunesian speakers came from a part of
    Asia near the Malay Peninsula and later migrated west as far as Madagascar and east
    to the Pacific. This migration probably began well over two thousand years ago.
    Because Malayo-Polynesian speakers lived on thousands of islands that were often
    widely separated, many dialects and, in time, languages evolved from the ancestral
    language, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian.
    The Austronesian language family is usually divided into two branches: Malayo-
    Polynesian and Formosan. The Malayo-Polynesian branch is by far the largest of the
    two. It is traditionally divided into two main sub-branches.

    • The Western sub-branch includes over 500 languages spoken in Madagascar,


    Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, parts of Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and
    Cambodia. Two languages of Micronesia (Chamorro and Palauan) are also
    included in this group. This branch represents over 300 million speakers and
    includes such widely spoken languages as Javanese, Malay, and Tagalog.

    • The Central-Eastern sub-branch, sometimes referred to as Oceanic, contains


    around over 500 languages spoken in most of New Guinea, and throughout the
    10,000 or more islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Despite its
    diversity and geographic spread, this branch represents slightly under 2
    million speakers. The aboriginal languages of Australia and the Papuan
    languages of New Guinea are not included in this branch.

    It is worth noting that many of the languages included in the Austronesian family
    have only a handful of speakers each, especially in Melanesia, where the average is
    roughly one language for every 1,500 people. Many of the languages are endangered,
    on the brink of extinction, and some of them are already extinct.
    Below is a list of the Austronesian languages with the largest number of speakers in
    their respective branches.
    Number of Where spoken
    Language
    speakers primarily
    Malayo-Polynesian (1239 languages)
    Western (531 languages)
    Javanese 75,508,300 Indonesia
    Sunda (Sundanese) 27,000,000 Indonesia
    Indonesian (Bahasa 23,143,354 Indonesia
    Indonesia)
    Cebuano 20,043,502 The Philippines
    Malay 17,604,253. Malaysia
    Tagalog (Pilipino) 15,900,098. The Philippines
    Ilokano 8,000,000 The Philippines
    Minangkabau 6,500,000 Sumatra, Indonesia
    Malagasy (Plateau) 6,000,000 Madagascar
    Banjar 5,900,000 Indonesia
    Bali 3,900,000 Indonesia
    Malay Pattani 3,100,000 Thailand
    Ace (Acehnese) 3,000,000 Indonesia
    Sasak 2,100,000 Indonesia
    Malay Makassar 1,876,548 Indonesia
    Malagasy, Tsimiheti 1,100,000 Madagascar
    Central-Eastern (Oceanic) 706 languages
    Samoan 371,000 Samoa
    Fijian 330,000 Fiji
    Tahitian 124,000 Tahiti
    Tongan 105,000 Tonga
    Maori up to 70,000 New Zealand
    Kiribati 68,000 Kiribati
    Chamorro 62,000 Guam
    Marshallese 44,000 Marshall Islands
    Rapa Nui 3,500 Easter Island
    Hawai'ian 1,000 Hawai'i, U.S.A
    Formosan (all but 2 extinct)
    Amis 138,000 Taiwan
    Saisiyat 4,750 Taiwan

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