Black ovals at the northwestern limit of Micronesia are the non-Oceanic languagesPalauan andChamorro. Black circles within green are offshorePapuan languages.
Many languages of the Malayo-Polynesian family in insular Southeast Asia show the strong influence ofSanskrit,Tamil andArabic, as the western part of the region has been a stronghold ofHinduism,Buddhism, and, later,Islam.
Two morphological characteristics of the Malayo-Polynesian languages are a system ofaffixation andreduplication (repetition of all or part of a word, such aswiki-wiki) to form new words. Like other Austronesian languages, they have small phonemic inventories; thus a text has few but frequent sounds. The majority also lackconsonant clusters. Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number.
The term "Malayo-Polynesian" was originally coined in 1841 byFranz Bopp as the name for the Austronesian language family as a whole, and until the mid-20th century (after the introduction of the term "Austronesian" byWilhelm Schmidt in 1906), "Malayo-Polynesian" and "Austronesian" were used as synonyms. The current use of "Malayo-Polynesian" denoting the subgroup comprising all Austronesian languages outside of Taiwan was introduced in the 1970s, and has eventually become standard terminology in Austronesian studies.[1]
In spite of a few features shared with theEastern Formosan languages (such as the merger ofproto-Austronesian *t, *C to /t/), there is no conclusive evidence that would link the Malayo-Polynesian languages to any one of the primary branches of Austronesian on Taiwan.[1]
Malayo-Polynesian consists of a large number of small local language clusters, with the one exception beingOceanic, the only large group which is universally accepted; its parent languageProto-Oceanic has been reconstructed in all aspects of its structure (phonology, lexicon, morphology and syntax). All other large groups within Malayo-Polynesian are controversial.
The most influential proposal for the internal subgrouping of the Malayo-Polynesian languages was made byRobert Blust who presented several papers advocating a division into two major branches, viz.Western Malayo-Polynesian andCentral-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian.[2]
Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian is widely accepted as a subgroup, although some objections have been raised against its validity as a genetic subgroup.[3][4] On the other hand,Western Malayo-Polynesian is now generally held (including by Blust himself) to be an umbrella term without genetic relevance. Taking into account theCentral-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian hypothesis, the Malayo-Polynesian languages can be divided into the following subgroups (proposals for larger subgroups are given below):[5]
The position of the recently rediscoveredNasal language (spoken on Sumatra) is unclear; it shares features of lexicon and phonology with bothLampung andRejang.[6]
Edwards (2015)[7] argues thatEnggano is a primary branch of Malayo-Polynesian. However, this is disputed by Smith (2017), who considers Enggano to have undergone significant internal changes, but to have once been much more like other Sumatran languages in Sumatra.
The status of the Philippine languages as subgroup of Malayo-Polynesian is disputed. While many scholars (such asRobert Blust) support a genealogical subgroup that includes the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi,[8] Reid (2018) rejects the hypothesis of a single Philippine subgroup, but instead argues that the Philippine branches represent first-order subgroups directly descended from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian.[9]
The Greater North Borneo hypothesis, which unites all languages spoken on Borneo except for theBarito languages together with theMalayo-Chamic languages,Rejang andSundanese into a single subgroup, was first proposed by Blust (2010) and further elaborated by Smith (2017, 2017a).[12][13][14]
Because of the inclusion of Malayo-Chamic and Sundanese, the Greater North Borneo hypothesis is incompatible with Adelaar's Malayo-Sumbawan proposal. Consequently, Blust explicitly rejects Malayo-Sumbawan as a subgroup. The Greater North Borneo subgroup is based solely on lexical evidence.
Based on a proposal initially brought forward by Blust (2010) as an extension of the Greater North Borneo hypothesis,[12] Smith (2017) unites several Malayo-Polynesian subgroups in a "Western Indonesian" group, thus greatly reducing the number of primary branches of Malayo-Polynesian:[13]
The Malayo-Polynesian languages except Chamorro, Palauan, and Moklenic can be classified under a "Late Malayo-Polynesian" dialect network around 3,000 BP. The position ofChamic, not listed in the table above, is uncertain.
^Zobel, Erik, "The position of Chamorro and Palauan in the Austronesian family tree: evidence from verb morphosyntax". In: Fay Wouk and Malcolm Ross (ed.), 2002.The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Australian National University.
^Adelaar, A. (2005).Malayo-Sumbawan.Oceanic Linguistics, 44(2), 357–388.
