Austronesian

node · earth · Taiwan, island Southeast Asia, Madagascar, Oceania

The family of roughly a thousand or more languages spread across the widest span of any pre-modern family: from Madagascar off East Africa, through island Southeast Asia and the Philippines, to Hawai'i, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa New Zealand. Its internal structure is the strongest geographical argument in linguistics. The overwhelming majority of member languages lie outside Taiwan, yet almost all of the family's deepest divisions are found among the Formosan languages of Taiwan itself, and everything from the Philippines eastward and westward belongs to a single subgroup, Malayo-Polynesian, which forms only one branch among many. Diversity marks antiquity: a lineage accumulates divisions where it has been longest. Taiwan is therefore identified as the homeland not because it holds the most languages but because it holds the most different ones, and that inference has since been matched by an archaeological sequence of dated settlement running outward in the same order. Austronesian is the family where the tree and the map can be laid over each other and checked.