Taiwan

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The island off the southeastern coast of mainland China which holds the deepest divisions of the Austronesian family, and is therefore identified as its homeland. The indigenous Formosan languages number only a dozen or so surviving today — a small fraction of Austronesian's total — yet they occupy nearly all of the family's primary branches, while the thousand-odd languages spread from Madagascar to Rapa Nui descend from a single one of those branches, Malayo-Polynesian. This inverted relationship between language count and genealogical depth is the whole argument: diversity, not abundance, marks the place a lineage has occupied longest, on the same logic that identifies a species' centre of origin. The linguistic inference was subsequently matched by an archaeological one, with dated Neolithic sequences showing settlement expanding from Taiwan into the northern Philippines and onward. The Formosan languages are also, by a bitter irony that this Journey should not pass over, among the most endangered in the family: the branches that carry the evidence for the homeland are held by the smallest communities.