Austronesian languages

Austronesian
Geographic distribution	Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Hainan (China), and Oceania
Ethnicity	Austronesian peoples
Native speakers	(undated figure of 328 million)[1]
Linguistic classification	One of the world's primary language families
Proto-language	Proto-Austronesian
Subdivisions	Atayalic Bunun East Formosan Malayo-Polynesian Western Plains Northwest Formosan Paiwan Puyuma Rukai Tsouic
Language codes
ISO 639-2 / 5	map
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	aust1307
The historical distribution of Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages (/ˌɔːstrəˈniːʒən/ AW-strə-NEE-zhən) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples).^[2] They are spoken by about 328 million people (4.4% of the world population).^[1][3] This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay (a pluricentric macrolanguage spoken by 290 million people, including as Indonesian),^[4][5] Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog (standardized as Filipino),^[6] Malagasy and Cebuano. According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages, which is the second most of any language family.^[7]

In 1706, the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland first observed similarities between the languages spoken in the Malay Archipelago and by peoples on islands in the Pacific Ocean.^[8] In the 19th century, researchers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herman van der Tuuk) started to apply the comparative method to the Austronesian languages. The first extensive study on the history of the phonology was made by the German linguist Otto Dempwolff.^[9] It included a reconstruction of the Proto-Austronesian lexicon. The term Austronesian was coined (as German austronesisch) by Wilhelm Schmidt, deriving it from Latin auster "south" and Ancient Greek νῆσος (nêsos "island"), meaning the "Southern Island languages".^[10]

Most Austronesian languages are spoken by the people of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. Only a few languages, such as Urak Lawoiʼ and the Chamic languages (except Acehnese), are indigenous to mainland Asia, or Malagasy which is the only Austronesian language indigenous to Insular East Africa. There are few Austronesian languages which have populations exceeding a few thousand, but a handful have speaking populations in the millions. For example, Indonesian is spoken by around 252 million people.^[11] This makes it the tenth most-spoken language in the world. Approximately twenty Austronesian languages are official in their respective countries (see the list of major and official Austronesian languages).

By the number of languages they include, Austronesian and Niger–Congo are the two largest language families in the world. They each contain roughly one-fifth of the world's languages. The geographical span of Austronesian was the largest of any language family in the first half of the second millennium CE, before the spread of Indo-European languages in the colonial period. It ranged from Madagascar to Easter Island in the eastern Pacific.

According to Robert Blust (1999), Austronesian is divided into several primary branches, all but one of which are found exclusively in Taiwan. The Formosan languages of Taiwan are grouped into as many as nine first-order subgroups of Austronesian. All Austronesian languages spoken outside the Taiwan mainland (including its offshore Yami language) belong to the Malayo-Polynesian (sometimes called Extra-Formosan) branch.

Most Austronesian languages lack a long history of written attestation. The oldest inscription in the Cham language, the Đông Yên Châu inscription dated to c. 350 AD, is the first attestation of any Austronesian language.