#austronesian

Aesthetic of the languages on earth : Cebuano

By Vrata - CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6602967

The Austronesian peoples are named so because they speak languages that are part of the language family that most likely originated in Taiwan, also known as Formosa, where the most branches of this family are found among the natives of the island. There are 'as many as nine first-order subgroups of Austronesian' while off of Taiwan, including it's offshore islands, all of the languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian, or Extra-Formosan, branch. The diversity among the languages of native Taiwanese is 'greater than that in all the rest of Austronesian put together, so there is a major [linguistic] genetic split within Austronesian between Formosan and the rest'.

The similarities in the languages of the Southeast Asia Archipelago and the Pacific islands was noticed written about as far back as 1706 by a Dutch scholar and the first extensive study taking place in the early 20th century. By and large, Austronesian languages contain between 15-20 consonant sounds and 4-5 vowel sounds, 'at the lower end of the global typical range of 20-37 sounds'. There are outliers, such as Nemi of New Caledonia, which has 43 consonant sounds. Words are usually formed in the shape of CV(C)CVC, with C = consonant and V = vowel. Most languages place limits on what consonants can go together in the middle of a word while it is common for a drift to occur that will also limit the sounds that can occur at the end, or even eliminating it. Most of the languages are agglutinative languages, meaning that words are formed through the process of stringing prefixes (morphemes that go before), suffixes (morphemes that go after), and sometimes infixes (morphemes that are are inserted to a word) to a base word, and frequently use reduplication to change the meaning of a word, such as the full reduplication of the Karo Batak nipe-nipe to make caterpillar out of snake (nipe), while others use partial reduplication, such as the Agta use of at-atu to make puppy from dog (atu).

Broadly, Austronesian grammar falls into three groups which are known as Philippine-type, Indonesian-type, and post-Indonesian type. The Philippine-type has 'three or four verb voices [that] determine which semantic role the "subject"/"topic" expresses (it may express either the actor, the patient, the location and the beneficiary, or various other circumstantial roles such as instrument and concomitant)…word order has a strong tendency to be verb-initial'. Indonesian-type 'reduced the voice system to a contrast between only two voices (actor voice and "undergoer" voice), but these are supplemented by applicative [a grammatical voice that promotes an oblique argument of the verb] morphological devices…which modify the semantic role of the "undergoer"…these languages mostly tend towards verb-second word-orders'. Post-Indonesian no longer have a voice system and 'the voice-marking affixes no longer preserve their functions'.

Cognate sets, or 'sets of words from multiple languages, which are similar in sound and meaning which can be show to descend from the same ancestral word in Proto-Austronesian according to regular words', are widely studied. Some cognate sets are relatively obvious, such as 'mata' meaning 'eye' in many Austronesian languages, from northern Taiwan through to the southern Māori. Other words are less obvious, such as the word 'two', which 'require[s] some linguistic expertise to recognise' as in Bunun, spoken in central Taiwan, it is 'dusa', in Amis, on the east coast of Taiwan, it is 'tusa', and in Māori, it is 'rua'. The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (ABVD), a 'comprehensive inventory of basic vocabulary lists' for about 1000 Austronesian languages also connects cognates.