Overview and history
The Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family covers a wide geographic area, from Madagascar to Easter Island, and from Taiwan and Hawai'i to New Zealand. This geographic spread is the reason why this family of languages is alternatively called Malayo-Polynesian. Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, both in terms of the number of languages (1244) and in terms of its geographical extent.

Austronesian languages are spoken by approximately 300 million people in Madagascar, the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia and New Guinea, the Philippines, Taiwan, the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian islands, and New Zealand. Today four Malayo-Polynesian languages have official status in four countries. These languages are widely spoken and understood as native or as second languages in their respective countries.

• Malagasy, in Madagascar
• Malay, in Malaysia
• Indonesian (also called Bahasa Indonesia, a language based on Malay), in Indonesia
• Pilipino (based on Tagalog), in the Philippines.

Despite extensive research into Austronesian languages in the past several decades, their origin and early history remain largely unknown. Several competing theories of classification remain a matter of controversy to this day. Because there are many structural differences between the Austronesian languages, linguists estimate that they must have split from their common ancestor 4,000 or more years ago.

It is thought that the original Proto-Malayo-Polunesian speakers came from a part of Asia near the Malay Peninsula and later migrated west as far as Madagascar and east to the Pacific. This migration probably began well over two thousand years ago. Because Malayo-Polynesian speakers lived on thousands of islands that were often widely separated, many dialects and, in time, languages evolved from the ancestral language, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian.

The Austronesian language family is usually divided into two branches: Malayo-Polynesian and Formosan. The Malayo-Polynesian branch is by far the largest of the two. It is traditionally divided into two main sub-branches.

• The Western sub-branch includes over 500 languages spoken in Madagascar, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, parts of Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Two languages of Micronesia (Chamorro and Palauan) are also included in this group. This branch represents over 300 million speakers and includes such widely spoken languages as Javanese, Malay, and Tagalog.
• The Central-Eastern sub-branch, sometimes referred to as Oceanic, contains around over 500 languages spoken in most of New Guinea, and throughout the 10,000 or more islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Despite its diversity and geographic spread, this branch represents slightly under 2 million speakers. The aboriginal languages of Australia and the Papuan languages of New Guinea are not included in this branch.

It is worth noting that many of the languages included in the Austronesian family have only a handful of speakers each, especially in Melanesia, where the average is roughly one language for every 1,500 people. Many of the languages are endangered, on the brink of extinction, and some of them are already extinct.

Below is a list of the Austronesian languages with the largest number of speakers in their respective branches.

Numbers in five major Malayo-Polynesian languages

Look at the numerals 1-10 in five Malayo-Polynesian languages

1. Do you see any similarities across these languages?
2. What differences do you see across these languages?
3. Which two languages appear to be the closest?

Click on the name of the language to learn more about it on this website

Javanese
Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)
Malay (Bahasa Melayu)
Malagasy
Tagalog (Pilipino)
Cebuano
Ilokano
Hawai'ian