The Family of a Thousand Languages, Part II: Austronesia Rules the Waves
The usual explanation for why Austronesian speakers left Taiwan around 1500 BC is population pressure. Over the following centuries, their descendants colonised what are now the Philippines and Indonesia; these include some very large, fertile islands, but settled life evidently left something to be desired.
From the early centuries of the Christian Era, Austronesians sailed on shockingly basic wooden boats to the far reaches of the earth. Of course, their languages are probably most familiar to people in the West as those of the beautiful specks of white sand that dot the Pacific. The intrepid forebears of today’s Pacific islanders would find one tiny island, live there for a few generations, then, when it became crowded, pack up and move on to find a new one.
By about 900 A.D., they reached Hawaii, the juicy reward for a millennium of exploration. When European explorers started to map the vast sea in the 18th Century, it became pretty clear early on that the inhabitants of its many islands shared a common ancestry. Indeed, all Austronesian languages outside Taiwan belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family. Given their recent common ancestry and their wanderlust, their languages had not diverged that much.
As mentioned in Part I, Austronesian languages are notable for their simple grammar and ease of pronunciation. Hawaiian, for example, has just eight consonants (including a glottal stop), and five vowels (compared to 24 and 20 in English). Word order in many languages is loose, so it is easy for even a poor speaker (as many learners of linguae francae like Bahasa and Tagalog have historically been) to make him- or herself understood.
But there are some unusual features that can trip up foreigners. Many have two different versions of “we,” with one for groups that include the speaker and one for those that do not (imagine what dramatic rhetorical flourishes we could do with that in English). Some, like Maori, have a complex scheme of expressing possession somewhat analogous to grammatical gender in European languages. Javanese has a special register used only by chiefs, and secret languages spoken within certain trades. Balinese has three levels of formality, each with its own vocabulary: “to eat” could be naar, neda, or ngadjengang, depending on one’s audience. This level of esoteria is possible within established, homogeneous communities- in languages learnt and garbled by large numbers of foreign adults, they erode quickly. Most other Austronesian languages fall into the latter category.
The most surprising member of the family is Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. Around 500 B.C., people from what is now Indonesia somehow sailed 4,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to a new home off the coast of East Africa. To linguists it is perhaps most notable for its highly unusual verb-object-subject word order. (About half of languages are subject-object-verb, and another third, including English, are subject-verb-object; VOS is very rare, but the real unicorn is OSV, only recently discovered in some indigenous languages deep in the Amazon).
On the opposite geographic extreme is Rapa Nui, spoken by a few inhabitants of the Pacific speck better known as Easter Island. Easter Island is among the most remote places on earth, more than a thousand miles away from the nearest landmass. There is speculation that intrepid Rapa Nui sailors even reached South America- if they did not, then where did Pacific Islanders get sweet potatoes?
From East Africa to the South Pacific, Malayo-Polynesian speakers are prolific seafarers. Those few members of the family who settled on dry land fared worse. There is reason to believe that the first stop after Taiwan was the Yangtze River Delta, whence early Austronesians were eventually chased by the expanding Han Chinese. Into the modern era, the Austronesian-speaking Cham were a major power in what is now southern Vietnam. They played a key role in Asian history by developing a hyper-fecund new strain of rice that sparked an economic bonanza in medieval China. Some still live in the remote highlands between Vietnam and Cambodia, though others fled communist persecution to Malaysia, whose Islamic faith and related language made it easy to integrate. (The 1970s refugees were not the first to leave Champa- an earlier wave settled in Aceh in northern Sumatra, which is now the heartland of Indonesian Islamism.)
From the arrival of Captain Cook and his runny-nosed sailors in the 1780s, to Japan’s severe assimilation policies and outright genocide in the 1940s, the Malayo-Polynesian languages have sometimes come under threat in the modern era. But compared to many other peoples, their history has been a fairly happy one.
Languages spoken by sailors and traders are often happy to accept vocabulary from those with whom they come into contact. Some Western languages have returned the favour. Hawaiian culture is well-known in America, to the extent that the greeting/farewell aloha is basically part of American English. As the pregame ritual of the perennial champion All Blacks rugby team, the haka war dance has travelled farther even than the Maori did to reach New Zealand.
The Pacific islands gave us two everyday English words, “tattoo” and “taboo” (whose native meaning encompassed a wide range of restrictions, including that if a chief stayed in a subject’s house then the unfortunate host had to move). But most important, to me at least, is the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick,” which is grafted onto a Greek suffix to give us Wikipedia. To a certain extent, this blog would not be possible without Austronesian.
