Translations Fleet

Previous to the British Colonial expansion, the Austronesian language family had the widest geographical distribution for any language family. This includes over 1200 different languages spread across the Madagascar islands, from the east coast of Africa to the small Islands of Rapa Nui (Easter Islands). It had also extended to the Vietnam, Taiwan, New Zealand, Northern Australia and most of the Polynesian and Melanesian Islands. The Austronesian language family was comparable to Uralic, Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic regarding established languages.

The maximum numbers of native speakers is in the Bahasa Indonesia with approximately 210 million people. Bahasa is a modern language which was developed upon the age-old lingua franca of the East Indian archipelago, which includes part of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Although the Autronesian languages are spread in a wide geographical location, the resemblance can easily be established by the basic subsystems of the numerical and the personal pronouns. About 14 of the ancient languages of the Chinese aboriginals are still in vogue.

Dutch missionaries attested Favorlang and Siraya, now extinct, during 1624 to 1662 in the Southwestern Taiwanese region. In Malaysia, mainly in the Bornean states of Sarawak and Sabah, about 110 different types of Austronesian languages are still spoken.

In Cambodia, Vietnam, border regions of Laos and in the southern China, about 8 different types of Austronesian languages are in use. Around 900 languages of this family are distributed in the Indonesia, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. It is also spoken in the offshore islands of Papua-New Guinea. Observers point out  that Papuan languages comprise more than 20% of the total number of languages that are spoken across the world today.

According to the famous linguists Prof. MalcolmRoss, the Austronesian language family can be classified into three subtypes - the Indonesian-type languages, the Philippine-type languages and the post-Indonesian type. The Philippine-type languages show strong verb-initial order and a specific type of voice alternations. This language family uses highly limiting phonotactics and depends almost exclusively upon consonant-vowel syllables.