Austronesian languages

Austronesian languages is a family of languages widely dispersed throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, formerly referred to as Malayo-Polynesian languages. It has two subgroups: Continental (or Western) and Oceanic (or Eastern).

All Austronesian languages have a low entropy; that is, the text is quite repetitive in terms of the frequency of sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Vowels, however, are quite common.

Western has 300 million speakers and includes Bahasa Indonesia and Malay, Malagasy, Filipino and Tagalog, as well as many others.

Eastern has two subgroups: Polynesian and Micronesian[?]. Micronesian includes the languages spoken by the native peoples of Micronesia such as Sama. Polynesian languages include Hawai'ian, Māori, Samoan[?], Tahitian[?], Tongan[?] and Tuvaluan[?]. All of the said languages except Hawai'ian have official status in the countries and territories of the Pacific Ocean. Collectively they are spoken by about 1 million people.

Comparative reconstruction, confirmed by archaeology, has shown that the original homeland of all these languages was the island of Taiwan, and that the deepest divisions in Austronesian are among families of native Taiwanese (Formosan) languages (unrelated to Chinese). The older term 'Malayo-Polynesian' is sometimes still used for the entire non-Taiwanese branch of Austronesian.

All Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word) to express the plural.

External link

• Ethnologue report for Austronesian. (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=106)