ABSTRACT
The name ‘Austronesian’ was coined in 1899 by P.W. Schmidt, combining two existing formatives, Austro-(Latin auster ‘south’) and -nesian (Greek nesos ‘island’). Austronesian languages are in fact spoken primarily on islands rather than continental areas, and have a slight southern bias, though they are to be found on both sides of the Equator. The number of languages in the family is estimated at about a thousand. The core of ‘Austronesia’ includes Madagascar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and the Pacific island groups of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Apart from recent intrusions, the only non-Austronesian languages in this domain are found on the island of New Guinea (where Austronesian speakers are confined to coastal areas) and some islands near it, including Timor and Halmahera to the west and New Britain and Bougainville to the east. Austronesia can be divided geographically at about 130 degrees east longitude, a line
running just west of the Caroline Islands and New Guinea. The more than 600 languages spoken west of this line have a total of over 350 million speakers. Among these, Javanese has by far the largest number of speakers (at least 75 million), and also the longest written tradition (inscriptions dating from the early ninth century AD), embodying an important literature. Malay, with far fewer native speakers, has nevertheless achieved wider currency, as the lingua franca of the Malay Archipelago for several centuries, and now serves as a national language of Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Other languages of regional importance in this area include Acehnese, Batak and Minangkabau of Sumatra, Sundanese of western Java, Madurese, Balinese and Sasak on islands east of Java, Iban and Ngadju of Borneo and Macassarese and Buginese of Sulawesi. More than a hundred Austronesian languages are spoken in the Philippines. The
national language (Pilipino) is based on Tagalog, which has 15 million native speakers in southwestern Luzon. Other important languages include Ilokano and Bikol, also of Luzon, and Cebuano and Hiligaynon (Ilongo) of the central islands. The indigenous people of Taiwan (Formosa) spoke Austronesian languages, but
large-scale Chinese settlement since the seventeenth century has made them a small minority of its population, living mainly in the mountainous interior and along the east
the Chinese. Formosan languages have been recorded, of which half are now extinct or moribund, the remainder having perhaps 350,000 speakers in all. The Austronesian presence on the Asian continent is confined to Malay (on the
Malay Peninsula) and the Chamic languages. There are about ten Chamic languages, spoken by ethnic minorities in southern Vietnam and Cambodia, numbering about a million speakers all together. Another Chamic language, Tsat, is spoken by a few thousand people on Hainan Island in southern China. The people of the Malagasy Republic, the far western outpost of Austronesia, speak
a group of dialects diverse enough to be considered several different languages, though they are all conventionally referred to as Malagasy. Merina, spoken by about a quarter of the population, is the national standard. The most striking contrast between the western and eastern regions of Austronesia is in
the scale of the speech communities. There are over 400 languages in the eastern region, but the total number of speakers is fewer than 4 million – a figure exceeded by several individual languages of Indonesia and the Philippines. In Melanesia, one of the world’s major foci of linguistic diversity, a typical language has only a few thousand or even a few hundred speakers. Among the larger Austronesian language communities in Melanesia are Tolai (60,000) at the eastern end of New Britain and Motu (15,000) on the south coast of New Guinea. Both these languages have acquired greater importance as a result of close contacts with European colonial administration, Tolai being spoken around the old German capital of Rabaul and Motu in the vicinity of Port Moresby, now the capital of Papua New Guinea. A simplified form of Motu (earlier called ‘Police Motu’ and now ‘Hiri Motu’) serves as lingua franca in much of the southern half of the country and has been recognised as one of the official languages of the National Parliament – the only Melanesian language to achieve such an official status. Other languages in Melanesia, while not necessarily having large numbers of speakers, have achieved regional importance through missionary use. Examples are Yabem and Gedaged on the north coast of New Guinea, Roviana in the western Solomon Islands and Mota in Vanuatu. The last, while spoken originally by only a few hundred people on one tiny island in the Banks group, has been widely used by Anglicans in both northern Vanuatu and the southeast Solomons. While the typical pattern in Melanesia is one or more languages per island, in Fiji,
Polynesia and Micronesia languages frequently extend over several neighbouring islands and correspondingly larger speech communities are common. Samoan (370,000 speakers), Tongan (100,000) and Fijian (330,000) are national languages of independent states. Other Polynesian languages in wide use are Tahitian (120,000), a lingua franca throughout French Polynesia; and Rarotongan or Cook Islands Maori (40,000). Several Polynesian languages are now also spoken by sizable emigrant communities in New Zealand, the United States and elsewhere. Hawaii and New Zealand have had a linguistic history very different from that of the
rest of Polynesia. Until the end of the eighteenth century both were populated entirely by Polynesians, but over the following hundred years massive intrusion by Europeans (and also Asians in the case of Hawaii) reduced the indigenous population to a relatively powerless minority, whose language was largely excluded from public life and actively suppressed in the schools. In the twentieth century, the erosion of Polynesian-speaking rural communities by migration to the cities and the spread of English-language mass communications have accelerated the decline. There are now fewer than a thousand native speakers of Hawaiian. New Zealand Maori, with more than 20,000 native speakers,
in and very few communities use the language as an everyday medium. Nevertheless, increased formal teaching of both languages (from pre-school immersion to university level) has produced a significant number of second-language speakers with varying degrees of skill, and progress has been made in public use and official recognition. Both languages continue to have an important role as vehicles for the arts of oratory and poetry, and as symbols of Polynesian identity in their respective countries. The small and scattered islands of Micronesia have about a dozen languages among
them. Some of these are spread over wide areas, such as Chuukic dialect chain occupying much of the western Caroline Islands, with about 60,000 speakers; Chamorro, spoken on Guam and the Marianas Islands to the north (75,000); and the languages of the Marshall Islands (45,000) and Kiribati (70,000). Others, such as the languages of Belau (Palau), Yap, Ponape, Kosrae (Kusaie), Nauru and the Polynesian atolls Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi, are restricted to single islands or compact groups.
