Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
Robert Blust's comparative work on Austronesian subgrouping established that almost all of the family's primary branches are Formosan — spoken on Taiwan by a small minority of the family's speakers — while the thousand or more languages from Madagascar to Rapa Nui descend from a single primary branch, Malayo-Polynesian. Because genealogical diversity accumulates where a lineage has been longest, that structure identifies Taiwan as the homeland, on evidence internal to the languages and independent of any archaeology.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Austronesian · concept · Taiwan, island Southeast Asia, Madagascar, Oceania · not located
- Taiwan · region · Taiwan
- The Austronesian expansion · phenomenon · Island Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Subgrouping, circularity and extinction: some issues in Austronesian comparative linguistics
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.
in Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei · 1999 · Partly verified
Blust, R., "Subgrouping, circularity and extinction: some issues in Austronesian comparative linguistics", in Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (Taipei, 1999)
Recorded on Austronesian
- Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
- Lapita voyagers enter Remote Oceania
- Dahl links Malagasy to Ma'anyan of southeastern Borneo
- Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
- A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.