Malayo-Polynesian languages (məlā`ō-pŏlĭnē`zhən), sometimes also called Austronesian languages (ô'strōnē`zhən), family of languages estimated at from 300 to 500 tongues and understood 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 important states: Malagasy, in Madagascar; Malay, in Malaysia; Indonesian (also called Bahasa Indonesia, and based on Malay), in Indonesia; and Pilipino (based on Tagalog), in the Philippines. These languages have come to be widely understood in their respective countries, although not always as a first language.

The Malayo-Polynesian family has two subfamilies, Western Malayo-Polynesian and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. The Western subfamily has the greater significance from both a cultural and a commercial viewpoint. Western Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by over 200 million people and include Malagasy, the language of 13 million people on the island of Madagascar; Malay, native to 28 million in Malaysia and the island of Sumatra, in Indonesia; Indonesian or Bahasa Indonesia [Indonesian language], which is based on the Malay language and is spoken natively by about 26 million people in Indonesia; Javanese, the mother tongue of 62 million people on Java; Sundanese, the language of 25 million, also on Java; Madurese, with 10 million speakers on Madura; Balinese, spoken by 2.5 million on Bali; and Pilipino or Tagalog, the native tongue of about 20 million in the Philippines. The Eastern branch consists of the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian groups of languages. Although there is a very large number of these languages, all together they are spoken by only 5 million people. Melanesian languages are found on the islands of Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, the Bismarck Archipelago, and New Guinea.

The Malayo-Polynesian languages exhibit an abundance of vowels and a comparative paucity of consonants. They also tend to have disyllabic roots, form derivatives by means of affixes, and use reduplication to indicate the plural and other grammatical concepts. Writing varies, some forms being based on the Roman alphabet and others on alphabets derived from Indian or Arabic scripts.

It is thought that the original Malayo-Polynesian 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, and because in earlier times communication among them was difficult, if not impossible, many dialects and, in time, languages evolved from the ancestor language, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. Although it has been suggested that the Malayo-Polynesian and Southeast Asian (or Austroasiatic) languages form a single Austric family, this has not been proved. In fact, the Malayo-Polynesian tongues do not seem to be related to any other linguistic family.

Bibliography

See R. C. Green and A. Pawley, The Linguistic Subgroup of Polynesia (1966).

Austronesian languages

formerly Malayo-Polynesian languages

Family of about 1,200 languages spoken by more than 200 million people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Madagascar, the central and southern Pacific island groups (except most of New Guinea; see Papuan languages), and parts of mainland Southeast Asia and the island of Taiwan. Before European colonial expansion, it had the widest territorial extent of any language family. A primary genetic division in the family separates the Austronesian languages of Taiwan from the remaining languages, which are divided into Western and Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. Western Malayo-Polynesian includes Javanese, which is spoken by about 76 million people—more than a third of all Austronesian speakers. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian includes Oceanic, the best-defined subgroup of Austronesian, comprising nearly all the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. Typological generalizations about Austronesian languages are difficult because of their enormous number and diversity, though content words tend to be disyllabic, and vowel and consonant inventories tend to be limited, especially in Polynesian. Written records in scripts of Southeast Asian provenance (see Indic writing system) survive for several languages, including Old Javanese and Cham, the language of the kingdom of Champa.