Austronesian languages

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"Austronesian" redirects here. For other uses, see Austronesian (disambiguation).
Austronesian
Geographic
distribution:		 Maritime Southeast Asia, Oceania, Madagascar, Taiwan
Genetic
classification:		 one of the world's major language families; although links with other families have been proposed, none of these has received mainstream acceptance
Subdivisions:
Formosan (composed of many branches)
ISO 639-2: map
Map showing the distribution of language families (Austronesian languages are coloured in soft pink)

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 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 autochthonous to mainland Asia. Many Austronesian languages are small, spoken by only a few people, but the major Austronesian languages are spoken by millions and tens of millions of people. Some Austronesian languages are official languages (see the list of Austronesian languages).

There is legitimate debate among linguists as to which language family comprises the largest number of languages. Austronesian is clearly one candidate, with 1268 (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.

Contents

[edit] 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:

“ ... the internal diversity among the... Formosan languages... is greater than that in all the rest of Austronesian put together, so there is a major genetic [see Genetic (linguistics)] split within Austronesian between Formosan and the rest... Indeed, the genetic diversity within Formosan is so great that it may well consist of several primary branches of the overall Austronesian family. ”

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 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:

“ Implied in... discussions of subgrouping [of Austronesian languages] is a broad consensus that the homeland of the Austronesians was in Taiwan. This homeland area may have also included the P'eng-hu (Pescadores) islands between Taiwan and China and possibly even sites on the coast of mainland China, especially if one were to view the early Austronesians as a population of related dialect communities living in scattered coastal settlements. ”

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).

[edit] 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. Roger Blench (2004:12) said about Austro-Tai that:

“ Ostapirat [in press] assumes a simple model of a primary split with Daic [Tai-Kadai] being the Austronesians who stayed at home. But this seems unlikely. Daic looks like a branch of proto-Philippines and does not share in the complexities of Formosan. It may be better to think of proto-Daic speakers migrating back across from the northern Philippines to the region of Hainan island; hence the distinctiveness of Hlai and Be, and Daic the result of radical restructuring following contact with Miao-Yao and Sinitic. ”

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; however, this is rejected by all mainstream linguistic specialists. The evidence for any sort of connection between Japanese and Austronesian is slight, and many linguists think it is more plausible that Japanese might have instead been 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 Ryūkyū Islands and Kyūshū) as well as to the south. There is no genetic evidence for an especially close relationship between speakers of Austronesian languages and speakers of Japonic languages, so if there was any prehistoric interaction between speakers of proto-Austronesian and proto-Japonic languages, it is likely to have been one of simple cultural exchange without significant ethnic intermixture. In fact, genetic analyses consistently show that the Ryukyuans of the Ryukyu Islands between Taiwan and the main islands of Japan are genetically more dissimilar to the Taiwanese aborigines than are the Japanese people of the main Japanese islands, which suggests that if there was any interaction between proto-Austronesian and proto-Japonic, it probably occurred somewhere on the East Asian continent prior to the introduction of the Austronesian languages to Taiwan and the Japonic languages to Japan, or at least prior to the hypothetical extinction of Austronesian languages from mainland China and the introduction of Japonic to Japan.

[edit] Structure

It is very difficult to make meaningful generalizations about the languages that make up a family as rich and 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.

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.

[edit] 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 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.

[edit] 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:

Austronesian

[edit] Formosan classification II

Austronesian

[edit] Malayo-Polynesian classification

Quotations to Wouk & Ross (2002).
Malayo-Polynesian

[edit] Lexicon

The Austronesian language family is established by the linguistic Comparative method on the basis of cognate sets, sets of words similar in sound and meaning which can be shown to be descended from the same ancestral word in Proto-Austronesian according to regular rules. Some cognate sets are very stable. The word for eye in many Austronesian languages is mata (from the most northerly Austronesian languages, Formosan languages such as Bunun and Amis all the way south to Maori). Other words are harder to reconstruct. The word for two is also stable, in that it appears over the entire range of the Austronesian family, but the forms (e.g. Bunun rusya, lusha; Amis tusa; Maori tua, rua) require some linguistic expertise to recognise. The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database gives word lists (coded for cognacy) for approximately 500 Austronesian languages.

[edit] Major languages

Main article: List of major and official Austronesian languages

[edit] See also

[edit] 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. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
  • 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.
  • Blundell, David. "Austronesian Dispersal". 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). Taipei: Academia Sinica.
  • 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 403:709-710.
  • 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. Geneva, June 10-13.: Paper presented at the workshop on Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan
  • Ross, Malcolm & Andrew Pawley (1993). "Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history". Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 425-459. ISSN 0084-6570. OCLC 1783647. 
  • Ross, John (2002). "Final words: research themes in the history and typology of western Austronesian languages" in Wouk, Fay & Malcolm Ross (Eds.) The history and typology of Western Austronesian voice systems (pp. 451-474). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics
  • 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 (December 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. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
  • 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 ,eds. (2002), The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Pacific Linguistics. Canberra: Australian National University.

[edit] Further reading

  • Sagart, Laurent, Roger Blench, and Alicia Sanchez-Nazas (Eds.) {2004). The peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 0-415-32242-1.
  • Cohen, E. M. K. (1999). Fundaments of Austronesian roots and etymology. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 0858834367
  • Tryon, D. T., & Tsuchida, S. (1995). Comparative Austronesian dictionary: an introduction to Austronesian studies. Trends in linguistics, 10. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 110127296
  • Pawley, A., & Ross, M. (1994). Austronesian terminologies: contiunity and change. Canberra, Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. ISBN 0858834243
  • Blust, R. A. (1983). Lexical reconstruction and semantic reconstruction: the case of the Austronesian "house" words. [Hawaii: R. Blust.

[edit] External links

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Austronesian-speaking countries and territories
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