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
Bantu,
Indo-European,
Afro-Asiatic 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
indigenous to mainland Asia. Many Austronesian languages have very few speakers, but the
major Austronesian languages are spoken by tens of millions of people. Some Austronesian languages are
official languages (see the
list of Austronesian languages).
Otto Dempwolff, a German scholar, was the first researcher to extensively explore Austronesian using the
comparative method.
There is debate among linguists as to which language family comprises the largest number of languages. Austronesian is clearly one candidate, with 1,268 (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.
It is difficult to make generalizations about the languages that make up a family as 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 avoid this term. Many linguists feel that the phenomenon is better described as voice, and that the terminology creates confusion with more common uses of the word focus within linguistics.
