16 Facts About Austronesian languages

Austronesian languages are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan .

In 1706, the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland first observed similarities between the Austronesian languages spoken in the Malay Archipelago and by peoples on islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Many Austronesian languages have very few speakers, but the major Austronesian languages are spoken by tens of millions of people.

The geographical span of Austronesian languages was the largest of any language family before the spread of Indo-European in the colonial period.

All Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch.

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Austronesian languages overall possess phoneme inventories which are smaller than the world average.

Exceptional cases of tonal Austronesian languages are Moklen and a few Austronesian languages of the Chamic, South Halmahera–West New Guinea and New Caledonian subgroups.

Austronesian languages posited 40 first-order subgroups, with the highest degree of diversity found in the area of Melanesia.

The Oceanic Austronesian languages are not recognized, but are distributed over more than 30 of his proposed first-order subgroups.

Subsequently, the position of the Formosan languages as the most archaic group of Austronesian languages was recognized by Otto Christian Dahl, followed by proposals from other scholars that the Formosan languages actually make up more than one first-order subgroup of Austronesian.

The view that linguistic evidence connects Austronesian languages to the Sino-Tibetan ones, as proposed for example by Sagart, is a minority one.

Linguistic analysis of the Proto-Austronesian languages language stops at the western shores of Taiwan; any related mainland language have not survived.

French linguist and Sinologist Laurent Sagart considers the Austronesian languages to be related to the Sino-Tibetan languages, and groups the Kra–Dai languages as more closely related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Sagart argues for a north-south genetic relationship between Chinese and Austronesian languages, based on sound correspondences in the basic vocabulary and morphological parallels.

Austronesian languages's methodology has been found to be spurious by his peers.

Austronesian languages's identifies 82 possible cognates between Austronesian and Japanese, however her theory remains very controversial.