The Austronesian expansion

Assembled from 35 blocks · 3 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. The dispersal that carried one language family across roughly half the circumference of the planet, in a sequence that linguistics reconstructed and archaeology then dated. The conventional outline begins with movement out of Taiwan into the northern Philippines around the third millennium BCE, spreads through island Southeast Asia, and then divides: westward across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar in the first millennium CE, and eastward into the Pacific, where the Lapita cultural complex marks the entry into Remote Oceania — Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa — in the later second millennium BCE. Eastern Polynesia was settled much later, and the last major landmass reached was Aotearoa New Zealand, around the thirteenth century CE. What makes this the strongest case in comparative linguistics is that two independent records agree in order: the branching structure of the family, derived purely from sound correspondences among modern languages, predicts a settlement sequence, and the radiocarbon chronology of pottery, houses and domesticates recovers substantially the same sequence. The dates come from archaeology; the order comes from the languages.
3. Knowledge
4. Austronesian
5. Taiwan
6. The Austronesian expansion
7. Connections
8. Malagasy
9. Austronesian
10. Taiwan
11. Dahl links Malagasy to Ma'anyan of southeastern Borneo
12. Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
13. A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
14. Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
15. Lapita voyagers enter Remote Oceania
16. Austronesian speakers settle Madagascar
17. Taiwan
18. Trans-New Guinea
19. Malagasy
20. The Austronesian expansion
21. Dahl links Malagasy to Ma'anyan of southeastern Borneo
22. Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
23. A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
24. Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
25. Lapita voyagers enter Remote Oceania
26. The Luzon Strait
27. Austronesian
28. The Austronesian expansion
29. Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
30. Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
31. The AI accelerator
32. Evidence
33. Supports the finding that nearly all primary branches of Austronesian are Formosan and that all extra-Formosan languages form a single branch, Malayo-Polynesian. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. Cited without pagination, and the specific number of primary branches Blust proposes is deliberately not quoted in this pack because it could not be checked.
34. Supports the agreement between the branching order of Austronesian language trees and the archaeological settlement sequence of the Pacific. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The volume number is given from standing knowledge and the page range is omitted rather than guessed.
35. Supports the identification of Ma'anyan, a Barito language of southeastern Borneo, as the closest known relative of Malagasy. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No page is cited and no correspondence set is quoted; the settlement date of Madagascar is not supported by this record and is stated as contested wherever it appears.