ABSTRACT
The Austronesian (AN) family is assumed to divide into two primary branches, Formosan and non-Formosan. The estimated 900 to 1,200 nonFormosan AN languages belong to a single enormous subgroup, known as ‘Malayo-Polynesian’ (MP). Within the MP subgroup the fundamental split separates Western MP (WMP: Philippines, western Indonesia, mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and Palau and the Marianas of western Micronesia), from Central-Eastern MP (CEMP: eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia except as qualified above, Polynesia). By far the most important CEMP subgroup is Oceanic, comprising over 450 languages in coastal New Guinea and the insular Pacific (Blust 1995: 458). The Austronesian languages therefore have a geographical distribution that is relatively unbroken, except for the outliers in Madagascar and Southern Vietnam.
