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Austronesian languages - definition of Austronesian languages in Encyclopedia (430 words) |
 | The Austronesian languages are a family of languages widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. |
| Austronesian has ten primary subgroups, nine of them found in Taiwan (the Formosan languages, unrelated to Chinese) and one ancestral to all other members of the family (Malayo-Polynesian languages). |
| Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, both in terms of number of languages (1244 according to Ethnologue) and in terms of the geographical extent of the homelands of its languages (from Madagascar to Easter Island). |
| NodeWorks - Encyclopedia: Austronesian languages (603 words) |
| Comparative reconstruction, confirmed by archaeology, has shown that the original homeland of the linguistic ancestors of all these languages was in south-eastern or eastern China, from which they emigrated to the island of Taiwan. |
| The internal structure of the Austronesian languages is difficult to work out, as the family consists of many very similar languages with large numbers of dialect chains. |
| However, it is clear that the greatest genealogical diversity is found among the Formosan languages of Taiwan, and the least among the islands of the Pacific, supporting a dispersal of the family from Taiwan. |
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