The Austronesian language family is absolutely vast, including over 1200 languages; for comparison Europe has only around 200, and the whole Indo-European family adds up to around 450.
I’ve only included 32 selected languages here, and for simplicity I’ve had to miss out entire branches of the family. Sorry to speakers and enthusiasts of the many, many languages not shown here. I hope my decision to include these 32 over others doesn’t feel to arbitrary. I’ve tried to include languages that are widely spoken, as well as the national languages of various Pacific nations.
The Austronesian languages are spoken by 328 million people, with the Malay and Philippine branches being by far the most widely spoken.
These languages originate in Taiwan, and it’s here where the majority of the linguistic diversity of the family is found: 19 of the 20 primary branches of the family are Formosan (Native Taiwanese), with the 20th, Malayo-Polynesian, being the only one to exist outside Taiwan. Six of those Formosan branches are shown towards the top of this image, while Malayo-Polynesian dominate the rest of the image. I even ended up putting Proto-Malayo-Polynesian at the centre of the image to prevent it from looking too unbalanced, although Proto-Austronesian is the earliest ancestor.
The Proto-Malayo-Polynesian language likely spread from Taiwan around 4000 years ago, and has since become incredibly widespread. Malayo-Polynesian speakers today include the native peoples of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Madagascar, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Hawaii, and every Pacific island nation. They also likely visited (but did not settle) the coasts of Africa, Australia, and South America.
Here’s a map showing the branches of the Austronesian family in my image. To fit them all in I’ve had to move Madagascar and Hawaii in, which hides the true geographic scope of this language family. It is spoken as far northeast US state of Hawaii, as far southwest as Chilian territory of Rapa Nui, as far north as Taiwan, and as far east as Madagascar in Africa.
Some of the Austronesian words for “two” bear a striking resemblance to the Indo-European words for two (see this image). However, it is highly likely that the similarity between Proto-Austronesian *duSa and Proto-Indo-European *dwóh is a coincidental one. The languages have their homelands on opposite sides of Asia, and there isn’t a statistically significant correlation in their other words to convince linguists that they are related families. See my post on false cognates for more examples of coincidentally similar words.
Author’s note:
I had various drafts of this image sitting on my laptop for a long time, unfinished because I really struggled with working out which languages to include, and the image kept growing more and more unwieldy and daunting.
What you see here is the result of a lot of pruning and simplifying: the previous draft had more than double the number of languages and was an absolute mess, which is why I abandoned it so long.
I’m glad I was finally able to overcome the perfectionist in me by shrinking the project down to something I can actually be happy posting, but I do apologise to the many hundreds of Austronesian language I ended up missing off the image.
I intend to use this same template for future images comparing related Austronesian vocabulary, so keep an eye out for that.
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