ABSTRACT
Languages spoken by populations of Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific islands including New Zealand and Easter Island, and Madagascar are Austronesian (Blundell 2000). Taiwan, with nine subgroups of Austronesian (the Formosan languages), possesses the greatest diversity, while all languages spoken outside Taiwan including Yami (or Tao) from Lanyu (Orchid Island) and Batan from the Batanes Islands, belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch with more than 1200 languages (Li 2000). According to oral tradition, the Yami and Batanes islanders have been continuously interacting since prehistoric times. Nowadays, the Batanes group of islands belongs politically to the Philippines and Orchid Island belongs to Taiwan (Chen 2001). The Batan archipelago comprises ten small islands of which only Batan, Itbayat and Sabtang are inhabited. The central position of the Batan group, 500 km north of Manila, and 128 km south of Orchid Island, made the archipelago a much frequented area by Austronesian speakers, but also by sailors at all times and epochs. Four hundred years ago, 40-seater sailing ships were regularly travelling back and forth between Orchid Island and Batan. During the Spanish dominion in the 18th century, communication between Orchid Island and Batan ceased. Since 1986, when an Ivatan woman married into a Yami family, sailing between Ivatan and Yami restarted. More recently, Christian missionaries went to Batan, and used a Yami Bible translation, as Yami is understood by both Batan and Yami islanders.
