2789: Austronesian Language History Aug 9, 2024

After Indo-European languages, which originally spanned from Europe’s Atlantic coast to northern India and now cover all continents, Austronesian languages form the second-largest language family in the world. While it might seem that the vast distances between Pacific islands contributed to this diversity, the true story is more complex.

For example, the many languages spoken from Papua New Guinea to New Zealand to Hawaii, and all other islands within this triangle, belong to a single branch of the Austronesian languages—the Oceanic family. The greatest diversity within this branch is found in Eastern Papua. In contrast, Taiwan alone hosts 9 of the total 14 Austronesian subfamilies. This island was the homeland of the seafaring Polynesian people before Chinese colonization. As a result, the hundreds of languages spoken in eastern and central Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines, and Malaysia (i.e., the Western Malayo-Polynesian languages) are more closely related to each other than the fewer native languages of Taiwan are to one another.

While it might be tempting to attribute this linguistic diversity to mountainous topography, mountains are not more of a barrier to contact than thousands of miles of open ocean. Instead, time is a more relevant factor.

Although many factors contribute to language change—and there is no single formula—it is often the case that greater distance from the origin results in less linguistic diversity. For example, American English is broadly more conservative (i.e., it has changed less) than British English since the early colonial period, similar to the story of Austronesian languages. Likewise, Icelandic is much closer to Old Norse and Old English than modern Norwegian or English are. On the other hand, language change accelerates when there is contact between different peoples, as seen in the transition from Dutch to Afrikaans, which is far less conservative.