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The Austronesian languages is a language family that is widely dispersed throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, with a few members on continental Asia. Austronesian languages are spoken by about 386 million people, making it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers, behind only the Indo-European languages, the Sino-Tibetan languages, the Niger-Congo languages, and the Afroasiatic languages. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger–Congo, and Afroasiatic as one of the best-established language families. Major Austronesian languages with the highest number of speakers are Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanese, and Filipino (Tagalog). Otto Dempwolff was the first researcher to extensively explore Austronesian using the comparative method. Another German, Wilhelm Schmidt, coined the German word ''austronesisch'' which comes from Latin ''auster'' "south wind" plus Greek ''nêsos'' "island". The name ''Austronesian'' was formed from the same roots. The family is aptly named, as the vast majority of Austronesian languages are spoken on islands: only a few languages, such as Malay and the Chamic languages, are indigenous to mainland Asia. Many Austronesian languages have very few speakers, but the major Austronesian languages are spoken by tens of millions of people and one Austronesian language, Malay, is spoken by 250 million people, making it the 8th most spoken language in the world. Twenty or so Austronesian languages are official in their respective countries (see the list of major and official Austronesian languages). Different sources count languages differently, but Austronesian and Niger–Congo are the two largest language families in the world, each having roughly one-fifth of the total languages counted in the world. The geographical span of Austronesian was the largest of any language family before the spread of Indo-European in the colonial period, ranging from Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa to Easter Island in the eastern Pacific. Hawaiian, Rapa Nui, and Malagasy (spoken on Madagascar) are the geographic outliers of the Austronesian family. According to Robert Blust (1999), Austronesian is divided in several primary branches, all but one of which are found exclusively on Taiwan. The Formosan languages of Taiwan are grouped into as many as nine first-order subgroups of Austronesian. All Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan (including its offshore Yami language) belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch, sometimes called ''Extra-Formosan''. Most Austronesian languages lack a long history of written attestation, making the feat of reconstructing earlier stages – up to distant Proto-Austronesian – all the more remarkable. The oldest inscription in the Cham language, the Đông Yên Châu inscription, dated to the mid-6th century at the latest, is also the first attestation of any Austronesian language. ==Structure== It is difficult to make generalizations about the languages that make up a family as diverse as Austronesian. Speaking very broadly, the Austronesian languages can be divided into three groups of languages: Philippine-type languages, Indonesian-type languages and post-Indonesian type . The first group includes, besides the languages of the Philippines, the Austronesian languages of Taiwan, Sabah, North Sulawesi and Madagascar. It is primarily characterized by the retention of the original system of Philippine-type voice alternations, where typically three or four verb voices determine which semantic role the "subject"/"topic" expresses (it may express either the actor, the patient, the location and the beneficiary, or various other circumstancial roles such as instrument and concomitant). The phenomenon has frequently been referred to as ''focus'' (not to be confused with the usual sense of that term in linguistics). Furthermore, the choice of voice is influenced by the definiteness of the participants. The word order has a strong tendency to be verb-initial. In contrast, the more innovative Indonesian-type languages, which are particularly represented in Malaysia and western Indonesia, have reduced the voice system to a contrast between only two voices (actor voice and "undergoer" voice), but these are supplemented by applicative morphological devices (originally two: the more direct *''-i'' and more oblique *''-an/-()kən''), which serve to modify the semantic role of the "undergoer". They are also characterized by the presence of preposed clitic pronouns. Unlike the Philippine type, these languages mostly tend towards verb-second word-orders. A number of languages, such as the Batak languages, Old Javanese, Balinese, Sasak and several Sulawesi languages seem to represent an intermediate stage between these two types.〔Adelaar, K. Alexander and Nikolaus Limmelmann. 2005. The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar. P.6-7〕〔Croft, William. 2012 Verbs: Aspect and Causal Structure. P.261〕 Finally, in some languages, which Ross calls "post-Indonesian", the original voice system has broken down completely and the voice-marking affixes no longer preserve their functions. The Austronesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word, such as wiki-wiki or agar-agar), and, like many East and Southeast Asian languages, most have highly restrictive phonotactics, with generally small numbers of phonemes and predominantly consonant–vowel syllables. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Austronesian languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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