The Family of a Thousand Languages, Part I: Out of Formosa
Scientists strive to be objective and rational, seeking truth through experiment and observation in a clean, unbiased setting. Unfortunately for linguists, the real world is not a laboratory. Languages seem never to behave the way you want them to.
However, there are enough languages out there, many very isolated, that there is plenty of material for professors to assign students to analyze. At Columbia, many of our projects involved being given a topographical map of some nondescript island, along with a comparative lexicon of its related dialects, and being asked to reconstruct the proto-language as it was when the inhabitants’ ancestors arrived.
These are not hypothetical islands- that would ruin the fun. In fact, almost all of the languages used for these projects come from one group, the king of small tropical islands: the Austronesian language family.
The family includes 1,257 languages, about a fifth of the world’s total. They are spread over half the globe, from East Africa to the heart of the South Pacific, and spoken by nearly 400 million people. Surprisingly, their ancestral homeland is a place where there is scant evidence they exist: Taiwan.
Linguists know that Austronesian originated there because that is where it has diverged by far the most: all but one of the branches of the family are spoken only in Taiwan. Today, Taiwan’s native people make up only 2–3% of the population, having been swamped in the past five centuries by settlers from China. Han cultural conquest has been even more total: just a third of indigenous Taiwanese speak their ancestral tongues.
These landlubbers are a distinct minority in the family: the Austronesians are probably the most nautical race on earth. In around 1500 B.C., they began to migrate across the seas, sailing thousands of miles in small wooden boats and settling on islands large and small.
Because they traveled so much, staying in contact with other speakers and teaching their languages to those they encountered, Austronesian languages are, in general, strikingly easy to learn. My uncle, a geologist who works for an oil company in Indonesia, never took a class in Indonesian yet says that shortly after arriving he was able to communicate with workers and locals in isolated drilling sites. Grammar is simple: there is no particular set word order, and plurals are formed simply by duplicating a noun (e.g., buaya buaya, “crocodiles”). There are no inflections, i.e., none of the declensions or verb conjugations that so bedevil learners of other (especially European) languages.
Austronesian languages are generally very easy and pleasant to pronounce. Hawaiian, for example, has only eight consonants and five vowels; there is a family-wide preference for crisp, open syllables, as in Fiji, Kiribati, and Tonga. It seems wrong that German linguists gave the family such a clunky Greco-Latin name (it basically means “of the southern islands”).
Indonesians refer to their language as Bahasa, which literally means “language.” This is doubly confusing because their neighbours in Malaysia call theirs the same thing. The two are, in fact, the same language; traditionally there was just Malay, but then the British and Dutch drew an arbitrary line through the Indies, and on either side people created standard Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia with marginal regional differences.
Malay owes its success- with over 250 million speakers, it is one of the world’s most-spoken languages- to its long tenure as the lingua franca for a very populous archipelago. A similar role is played by Tagalog, the official language of the Philippines (just to throw in more confusion, the official official register is called Filipino). Tagalog native speakers account for about a quarter of the Philippines’ 110 million people, but almost everyone else learns it. It helps that almost all of the country’s 185 minority languages are related to it, so closely that Filipinos often refer to them as dialects. (Incidentally, one of these, Cebuano, boasts the world’s second-biggest Wikipedia, thanks to an article-generating Swedish computer program.)
It is largely based on the Philippines’ linguistic diversity that linguists and anthropologists have deduced that the archipelago was the first place that Austronesian speakers settled after leaving Taiwan. For preliterate cultures, which the peoples of the Philippines were until the 16th Century, language is often the best proxy for history.
With the arrival of the Spanish, however, things changed dramatically. Tagalog absorbed as much as a quarter of its vocabulary from Spanish. It also absorbed a huge amount of vocabulary from Nahuatl- I saw one chart (admittedly, was not able to corroborate it) that cited it at 10%- so to some extent Filipinos may be the top inheritors of the Aztecs in the modern world.
Many of the most popular expressions in the language are of Spanish origin- for example, kamusta, “how are you?,” is a short hop from cómo estás. I was at a wedding with some of my Puerto Rican relatives last weekend, and my cousin’s fiancée, who is of Filipina descent, remarked that she was surprised how much Spanish she understood.
Of the 1,258 languages in the Austronesian family, Bahasa and Tagalog account for at least 90% of all speakers (depending on how you factor in bilingualism). They are both fascinating and boast rich heritages, but their (often quite surprising) junior relatives also deserve some exploration. Luzon and Java are lovely places to settle, but for other Austronesian speakers, farther islands called.
