Austronesian languages

Austronesian is a language family spanning Taiwan, island Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Madagascar, with more than 1,200 languages. Its members descend from a common ancestral language, Proto-Austronesian.

Proto-Austronesian language: The reconstructed ancestral language from which Austronesian languages descend. Comparative reconstruction traces the family back to this shared ancestor.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how their historical relationships can be established. Its comparative methods establish which languages belong to the family.
Malay language: A major Austronesian language and the basis of standardized forms used in Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore. Malay illustrates how a regional language can acquire national and administrative roles.
Austroasiatic languages: A language family of mainland Southeast Asia that includes Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon languages. Its geographic overlap with Austronesian languages does not make the families genealogically related.
Austronesian expansion: The prehistoric spread of Austronesian-speaking populations from Taiwan across the Pacific and into Madagascar. Its migrations carried related languages across an immense oceanic range.
Comparative method: A procedure for reconstructing ancestral languages by comparing systematic correspondences among related languages. It supports the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian from daughter languages.
Indonesian language: The standardized national language of Indonesia, based primarily on Malay. It demonstrates how an Austronesian language became a unifying national language.
Sino-Tibetan languages: A language family of East and Southeast Asia that includes Chinese and Tibetan languages. Shared regional contact can resemble shared ancestry, but these are separate families.
Taiwan: An island in East Asia with exceptional linguistic diversity and a central place in Austronesian origins research. Most models place the family’s homeland on or near Taiwan.
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian language: The reconstructed ancestor of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian languages. This intermediate ancestor anchors a major branch beyond Taiwan.

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