Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Malayo-Polynesian (also Austronesian)
Language group comprising approx. 500 languages with over 170 million speakers spread throughout Madagascar, South-East Asia, Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands. These languages can be divided into two main groups: East Malayo-Polynesian (or Oceanic, containing the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia) and West Malayo-Polynesian (including the languages of Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Madagascar, and parts of South-East Asia). The most important languages belong to the West Malayo-Polynesian group: Indonesian (about 100 million speakers, also as second language), Javanese (about 66 million speakers), Sundanese (about 17 million speakers), Malay (about 12 million speakers), Tagalog and Cebuano in the Philippines (about 13 million each), Malagasy (about 10 million speakers). Included among the less widespread languages of the East Malayo-Polynesian group are Fijian (about 300,000 speakers) and Samoan (about 200,000 speakers).
Scholars in the eighteenth century suspected that many of the languages of the Indian and Pacific Oceans actually belonged to a common linguistic group; Dempwolff (1934–8) undertook a successful historical reconstruction which is today fairly far advanced, if not uncontroversial. Benedikt (1975) has attempted to combine the Malayo-Polynesian languages with the Cam-Thai group to form a more comprehensive language family, Austro-Thai.
Characteristics: most of the languages have a fairly simple sound system, complex voice constructions and verb-initial word order (VSO, VOS). In the Oceanic territory noun class systems and ergative structures have developed.
References
Benedikt, P.K. 1975. Austro-Thai: language and culture. New Haven, CT.
Blust, R. 1988. Austronesian root theory. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA.
Dahl, O.C. 1973. Proto-Austronesian. Lund.
Dempwolff, O. 1934–8.
Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes. Berlin. (Repr. Nendeln 1969.)
Durie, M. 1985. A grammar of Acehnese. Dordrecht.
Dyen, I. 1965. A lexicostatistical classification of the Austronesian languages. Bloomington, IN.
Lenches, E.P.Y. 1976. Cebuano case grammar. 2 vols. Washington, DC.
Schumacher, W.W. et al. 1992. Pacific rim: Austronesian and Papuan linguistic history. Heidelberg.
Sebeok, T.A. (ed.) 1971. Current trends in linguistics, vol. 8: Oceania. The Hague.
Journals
Oceanic Linguistics.
Pacific Linguistics.
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