AUSTRONESIAN LANGUAGES : Comprehensive Encyclopedia

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.

There is legitimate debate among linguists as to which language family comprises the largest number of languages. However, Austronesian is clearly one candidate, with 1268 (according to Ethnologue). The geographical extent of the homelands of its languages is also among the most widespread, ranging 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".

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 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:

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 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. [For a recent dissenting analysis, see (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., Bellwood 1997) 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 (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 (2004:8) states:

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)].

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.[CITE?]

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

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 (Blust 1999). 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:

Formosan classification II

Malayo-Polynesian classification

References

Bellwood, Peter (July 1991). "The Austronesian Dispersal and the Origin of Languages". Scientific American 265: 88-93.
Bellwood, Peter (1997), Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.
Bellwood, Peter (1998). "Taiwan and the Prehistory of the Austronesians-speaking Peoples". Review of Archaeology 18: 39–48.
Bellwood, Peter; Fox, James; & Tryon, Darrell (1995). The Austronesians: Historical and comparative perspectives. Department of Anthropology, Australian National University. ISBN 0-7315-2132-3.
Bellwood, Peter & Alicia Sanchez-Mazas (June 2005). "Human Migrations in Continental East Asia and Taiwan: Genetic, Linguistic, and Archaeological Evidence". Current Anthropology 46:3: 480-485.
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.
David Blundell. "Austronesian Disperal". Newsletter of Chinese Ethnology 35: 1-26.
Blust, Robert (1985). "The Austronesian Homeland: A Linguistic Perspective". Asian Perspectives 20: 46-67.
Blust, R. (1999), "Subgrouping, circularity and extinction: some issues in Austronesian comparative linguistics." in E. Zeitoun & P.J.K Li, ed., Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics ((pp. 31-94) ed.), Academia Sinica, Taipei.
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, vol. 403, p. 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.
Fuller, Peter (2002). Reading the Full Picture. Asia Pacific Research. Canberra, Australia: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Retrieved on July 28, 2005.
Homepage of linguist Dr. Lawrence Reid. Retrieved on July 28, 2005.
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.
Lynch, John, Malcolm Ross and Terry Crowley, The Oceanic languages. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002.
Melton T., Clifford S., Martinson J., Batzer M., & Stoneking M. 1998. Genetic evidence for the proto-Austronesian homeland in Asia: mtDNA and nuclear DNA variation in Taiwanese aboriginal tribes. (PDF) American Journal of Human Genetics, 63:1807–1823.
Peiros, Ilia (2004), Austronesian: What linguists know and what they believe they know, Paper presented at the workshop on Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan, Geneva, June 10-13.
Ross, Malcolm & Andrew Pawley (1993). "Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history". Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 425-459.
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.
Terrell, John Edward (Dec. 2004). "Introduction: 'Austronesia' and the great Austronesian migration". World Archaeology 36:4: 586-591.
Thurgood, Graham (1999), From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects. Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications No. 28, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.
Trejaut JA, Kivisild T, Loo JH, Lee CL, He CL, et al. (2005) Traces of archaic mitochondrial lineages persist in Austronesian-speaking Formosan populations. PLoS Biol 3(8): e247.
Wouk, Fay and Malcolm Ross (ed.), The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Australian National University, 2002.

AUSTRONESIAN LANGUAGES

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