Gourt > Science > Social Sciences > Linguistics > Languages > Natural > Austronesian (47)
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). 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 Formosa (mainland Taiwan: the Formosan languages, which are unrelated to Chinese). All Austronesian languages spoken outside Formosa, including the offshore Yami language of Taiwan, belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch, sometimes called Extra-Formosan.
Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, both in terms of number of languages (1268 according to Ethnologue) and in terms of the geographical extent of the homelands of its languages (from Madagascar to Easter Island). It is also on par with Indo-European and Uralic as one of the best developed and most secure language family proposals. The name Austronesian comes from the Latin auster "south wind" plus the Greek nêsos "island".
Comparative reconstruction, confirmed by archaeology and Chinese records, suggests that the homeland of the linguistic ancestors of these languages was in eastern to south-eastern China, from Shandong through Fujian, from where they migrated to the island of Taiwan several millennia ago. On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native Formosan languages; none of the mainland languages have survived. (Modern mainland languages such as Cham are more recent migrants.)
More on [ Austronesian languages ]
Oceania :: Regional
Pacific Islanders :: Indigenous People
I favorited a YouTube video -- Austronesian Expansion: Social, Linguistic, Genetic Networks http://youtu.be/f7MgiNAbWg4?a
bethelross (Ronnie James Lowry) Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:39:25 -0000
I favorited a YouTube video -- Austronesian Expansion: Social, Linguistic, Genetic Networks http://youtu.be/f7MgiNAbWg4?a
404
2003 Festival of Austronesian Cultures in Taitung, Taiwan - Cultural festival for people speaking Austronesian languages, includes photos of past festivals.
404
Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database - Gives basic words in many Austronesian languages.
Meta Description: [ Gray Research Laboratory ]
Austronesian Language Comparison - Table of Malayo-Polynesian and Austronesian words.
Austronesian Languages - A brief description of Austronesian languages, with links to example languages, and classification schemes.
Austronesian Navigation and Migration - A discussion of the possibility of wider history of the Austronesians than is generally accepted, written by Paul Kekai Manansala.
500
Austronesian Partitives - Research paper by Yuri A. Lander, aiming to broaden current theory on partitive constructions using data from Austronesian languages.
Austronesian Vocabulary - A comparison fo 24 words in 6 Austronesian languages.
Endangered Languages of the Pacific Region - Survey of endangered Austronesian languages with bibliography.
Link Sink for Formosan and Malayo-Polynesian Linguistics - Austronesian language links organized by linguistic taxonomy.
404
The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar: Typological Characteristics - A book chapter by Nikolaus Himmelmann.
Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian Languages - PDF and Postscript format papers from the Austronesian workshop of the 1998 Lexical Functional Grammar Conference held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
WM's Austronesian and Other Indo-Pacific Links - Collection of web resources for Austronesian and related topics including general information, mailing lists, bibligraphies and pointers to home pages with topical material.
| underground | |
| Next Video | |
