Austronesian Languages | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The Austronesian language family is one of the largest recognized language families in the world, with close to one thousand members. About half the languages in this family, and the great majority of the speakers, are found in Southeast Asia. Several major languages of the region, as well as hundreds of smaller ones, belong to this family.

Family resemblances among neighboring languages of the Southeast Asian island region must have been apparent for millennia. Awareness of the Austronesian family's full extent, however, dates from the 17th century, when comparison of the vocabulary of Malay with those of Polynesian languages, such as Futuna, and Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, showed clear similarities that implied a common ancestor. From this linking of distant points comes an earlier name of the family, "Malayo-Polynesian." It is now recognized that Austronesian speakers are to be found from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east—more than half the distance around the world.

An example of the sort of resemblance that would have been noticed on even a casual comparison of these languages is the following:

	Two	Eye	Stone
Malay	dua	mata	batu
Malagasy	rua	masu	vatu
Futuna	lua	mata	fatu

Although this family thus extends beyond Asia into the African and Pacific regions, it is in Southeast Asia that the largest concentration of Austronesian speakers is to be found, and it was undoubtedly in this region that the original ancestral language (Proto-Austronesian) was spoken. Comparing some numerals from languages spoken in several Asian countries shows the same family resemblance:

	Two	Four	Five	Ten
Paiwan (Taiwan)	Dusa	sepach	Lima	puLuq
Ilokano (Philippines)	dua	uppat	lima	sangapulo
Jarai (Vietnam)	dua	pâ	rema	pluh
Tetun (Timor)	rúa	hāt	líma	sanúlu
Javanese	loro	papat	lima	sapuluh

Systematic description and comparison of a wide range of Austronesian languages by many scholars during the nineteenth century culminated in the work of the German physician Otto Dempwolff (1934–38), who demonstrated how various present-day languages had developed via regular sound changes from their common ancestor, Proto-Austronesian. The vocabulary items compared above, for example, are derived from hypothetical ancestral forms *duSa (two), *maCa (eye), *batu (stone), *Sepat (four), *lima (five), and *puluq (ten).

The establishment of historical relations of these many languages to their common ancestor makes possible a "family tree" showing closer and more distant relationships within the family. This linguistic evidence can be combined with evidence from archaeology and other disciplines to produce an outline of the origins and migrations of the peoples who spoke these languages.

The precise interrelations of the Austronesian languages of Southeast Asia have yet to be fully worked out. One point of widespread agreement, however, is that the languages of the aboriginal people of Taiwan divided from the rest of Austronesian at a very early date, and are thus of prime importance in understanding the history of the family. This primary division between Formosan languages and the rest suggests that Proto-Austronesian was spoken either in Taiwan or possibly on the nearby Chinese mainland. Beginning at least 5,000 years ago, Austronesian speakers would have migrated south into the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Guinea, and from there east into the Pacific (during the second millennium BCE) and eventually west to Madagascar (during the first millennium CE).

Although the Austronesian languages have been diversifying from their common ancestral form for thousands of years, and have spread over a vast geographical range and a wide variety of cultures, certain family traits have persisted, not only in basic vocabulary (as shown above), but in certain aspects of word structure and grammatical devices. One feature that differentiates Austronesian from other major language families of the region is a preference for two-syllable nouns and verbs, with consonants permitted at beginning, middle, and end, as in Tagalog: payat (thin), ngipin (tooth), gatas (milk). Possessive pronouns appear as suffixes on the possessed noun, as in Rampi (Sulawesi): umo'-ku (my father), umo'-mu (your father), umo'-ne (his or her father). Another very widespread Austronesian feature is the distinction of first-person plural pronouns into "inclusive"and "exclusive," depending on whether the person spoken to is included or not. So Tagalog kamí (exclusive) means "I and others," as contrasted with táyo (inclusive) "I, you and others."

Both Javanese (Kavi) and Malay appear in inscriptions from the middle of the first millennium CE, written in scripts of Indian origin. A number of other languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have had Indian-derived writing systems, and after the arrival of Islam the Arabic alphabet was used to write Malay and other Austronesian languages of the region. Although some of these scripts have continued to be used into the present, the trend of the last few centuries has been for them to be replaced by orthographies based on the Roman alphabet.

Throughout their history, these languages have continued to supplement their inherited Austronesian vocabulary with new words borrowed from a variety of sources. The strong influence of Indian culture at the period of earliest literacy is also reflected in numerous Sanskrit words adopted into the vocabulary, such as Malay bahasa (language), warna (color), and jaya (victory). Islamic culture brought with it words of Arabic origin such as hukum (law) and waktu (time). Additions to the vocabulary during the last few centuries have reflected differing colonial histories: Spanish words in the Philippines, Dutch in Indonesia, and English in Malaysia.

In 2002, Austronesian languages were spoken by more than 90 percent of the population in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines; in Singapore, Malay speakers are a substantial minority (15 percent). Within this region, apart from modern-era immigrant languages such as Chinese and Chabacano (creole Spanish), the principal non-Austronesian language areas are those of the Orang Asli of the Malay Peninsula, and the various Papuan language groups in eastern Indonesia (Irian Jaya, Halmahera, Timor). Various Austronesian language groups form one or two percent of the population in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan; while China and Myanmar have a single Austronesian community each (Tsat on Hainan Island in China, Moken in coastal Myanmar) with a few thousand speakers. At the opposite extreme from these tiny enclaves are some languages which number their speakers in tens of millions, including Javanese (75 million), Malay (35 million), Sundanese (27 million), Tagalog (17 million), and Cebuano (15 million). Some of these exercise an influence beyond their communities of native speakers through use as national languages. Tagalog forms the basis of Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, while Malay (which has been a regional lingua franca for centuries and developed many local varieties) has been made a national language of both Malaysia and Indonesia.

Bellwood, Peter, James J. Fox, and Darrell Tryon, eds. (1995) The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Blust, Robert. (1995). "The Prehistory of the Austronesianspeaking Peoples: A View from Language." Journal of World Prehistory 9,4: 453–510.

Dempwolff, Otto. (1934–1938) Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes. 3 vols. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

Tryon, Darrell T., ed. (1995) Comparative Austronesian Dictionary: An Introduction to Austronesian Studies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wurm, Stephen A., and Shirô Hattori, eds. (1981–1984) Language Atlas of the Pacific Area. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities.

This is the complete article, containing 1,149 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).