The Austronesian languages (/ˌɒstroʊˈniːʒən/, /ˌɒstrə/, /ˌɔːstroʊ-/, /ˌɔːstrə-/) are a language family,

widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and
Taiwan (by Taiwanese aborigines). There are also a few speakers in continental Asia.[2] They are spoken
by about 386 million people (4.9% of the world population). This makes it the fifth-largest language
family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian),
Javanese, and Tagalog (Filipino). According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages,
which is the second most of any language family.[3]

In 1706, the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland first observed similarities between the languages spoken in
the Malay Archipelago and by peoples on islands in the Pacific Ocean.[4] In the 19th century,
researchers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herman van der Tuuk) started to apply the comparative
method to the Austronesian languages. The first extensive study on the history of the sound system was
made by the German linguist Otto Dempwolff.[5] It included a reconstruction of the Proto-Austronesian
lexicon. The term Austronesian was coined by Wilhelm Schmidt. The word is derived from the German
austronesisch, which is based on Latin wikt:auster 'south' and Greek νῆσος 'island').[6]

The family is aptly named, because most Austronesian languages are spoken by island dwellers. 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. For example, Malay is spoken by 250 million people. This makes it the eighth
most-spoken language in the world. Approximately twenty Austronesian languages are official in their
respective countries (see the list of major and official Austronesian languages).

By the number of languages they include, Austronesian and Niger–Congo are the two largest language
families in the world. They each contain roughly one-fifth of the world's languages. The geographical
span of Austronesian was the largest of any language family before the spread of Indo-European in the
colonial period. It ranged from Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa to Easter Island in the
eastern Pacific. Hawaiian, Rapa Nui, Māori, and Malagasy (spoken on Madagascar) are the geographic
outliers.

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or
parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of
language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to
people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of
evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as
being genetically related.[1]

According to Ethnologue there are 7,117 living human languages distributed in 142 different language
families.[2][3] A "living language" is simply one that is currently used as the primary form of
communication of a group of people. There are also many dead languages, or languages which have no
native speakers living, and extinct languages, which have no native speakers and no descendant
languages. Finally, there are some languages that are insufficiently studied to be classified, and probably
some which are not even known to exist outside their respective speech communities.

Genealogically related languages present shared retentions; that is, features of the proto-language (or
reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing (convergence). Membership
in a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations; that is, common
features of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the entire family. For
example, Germanic languages are "Germanic" in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features
that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are
believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that
was the source of all Germanic languages.

According to Robert Blust (1999), Austronesian is divided into several primary branches, all but one of
which are found exclusively in 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 (sometimes called Extra-Formosan) branch.

Most Austronesian languages lack a long history of written attestation. This makes 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 AD at the latest, is the first
attestation of any Austronesian language.

Membership of languages in a language family is established by research in comparative linguistics.

Sister languages are said to descend "genetically" from a common ancestor. Speakers of a language
family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter
languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with the original speech community
gradually evolving into distinct linguistic units. Individuals belonging to other speech communities may
also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process.[4]