The Ngati Manu tribe is visiting Taiwan on a two-week trip to trace their roots on the island, as some researchers believe that the
Austronesian language was first developed in Taiwan.
The paper concludes by suggesting that accidental drift voyaging cannot alone account for all this, especially the diversity of these canoes, and that episodic interest by
Austronesian speakers in the small islands of CYP and TS and their resources is implicated.
In the fourth chapter, '
Austronesians in Madagascar: A Critical Assessment of the Works of Paul Ottino and Philippe Beaujard', Alexander Adelaar zooms into the cultural history of Madagascar through the arguments of these two prominent scholars on the island's linkages with South and Southeast Asia.
The book handles the archaeological record better, but speculations concerning
Austronesian still intrude on occasion.
All
Austronesian languages outside Taiwan show the merger of PAN *C with *t and *N with *n (Dahl 1973, Mills 1975).
The
Austronesian speakers who settled the islands of Southeast Asia and Madagascar were not "Malaysians" (19).
Rapongan was born and raised in Pongso no Tau, the home island of the Tau people, located forty kilometers southeast of Taiwan, where people continue to live close to their oceanic tradition, which is part of the larger
Austronesian culture.
I draw on my own enquiries in Lautem, (3) a growing body of ethnography that has emerged since Timor-Leste's independence that explores this re-emergence of local customs and traditions in public life, as well as an established body of anthropology relating to Eastern Indonesia and the wider
Austronesian world.
As we know that the
Austronesian language family is one of the largest language families in the world.