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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.) 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 said about Austro-Tai that, :Ostapirat 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. The evidence for this is slight, and many linguists think it is more likely that Japanese was instead 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 Ryukyu Islands and Kyushu ) as well as to the south. STRUCTURE 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 Asia n languages, have highly restrictive Phonotactics , with small numbers of Phoneme s and predominantly consonant-vowel syllables. MAJOR LANGUAGES ;Languages with more than four million native speakers
;Official languages
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 mainland 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. Formosan classification I (arranged approximately north to south) Austronesian
Formosan classification II Austronesian
Malayo-Polynesian classification Following Wouk & Ross (2002) Malayo-Polynesian
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