How many Malayo-Polynesian languages are there?
The. Malayo-Polynesian Family. of Languages. Also known as Austronesian, the Malayo-Polynesian Family is made up of over 1000 languages spread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well as South East Asia.
Is Filipino Malayo-Polynesian?
Tagalog language, member of the Central Philippine branch of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family and the base for Pilipino, an official language of the Philippines, together with English. It is most closely related to Bicol and the Bisayan (Visayan) languages—Cebuano, Hiligaynon (Ilongo), and Samar.
What language did the Polynesians speak?
The best-known Polynesian languages are Samoan, with about 200,000 speakers; Maori, spoken in New Zealand by about 100,000 persons; Tahitian, with an unknown number of native speakers but widely used as a lingua franca in French Polynesia; and Hawaiian, with only a few remaining native speakers but formerly spoken by …
What is the oldest Polynesian language?
Samoan
Samoan is the oldest and most spoken Polynesian language with an estimated 510,000 speakers worldwide. The Samoan language is most recognised for its phonological differences between formal and informal discussion as well as ceremonial speech used in Samoan oratory.
What is Hawaii’s second language?
As its other name, “Hawaiian Creole English,” implies, Pidgin is a complete language on its own. About 600,000 people speak Pidgin, mostly native Hawaiians. An additional 400,000 speak it as a second language. Advertisers often use it to target local Hawaiians.
Is Malay a Polynesian language?
All major and official Austronesian languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup. Malayo-Polynesian languages with more than five million speakers are: Malay (including Indonesian), Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog, Malagasy, Cebuano, Madurese, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, and Minangkabau.
What are the different groups of Malayo Polynesians?
Britannica lists the groups as: Formosan, West Malayo-Polynesian, Central Malayo-Polynesian, Western New Guinean, and Oceanic (739). These categories mean nothing to me. I like the original ones listed in Katzner’s book The Languages of the Worldbecause they’re easier to understand and seem more familiar.
What kind of language is the Polynesian language?
Linguistic taxonomists classify them as a subgroup of the much larger and more varied Austronesian family, belonging to the Oceanic branch of that family.
Where do the people of the Polynesian islands live?
The Polynesian languages form a language family spoken in geographical Polynesia and on a patchwork of outliers from south central Micronesia to small islands off the northeast of the larger islands of the southeast Solomon Islands and sprinkled through Vanuatu.
How many languages are in the Austronesian language family?
Figure 1 shows the major sub-groupings of Austronesian. At the top level, it is split into two families: Formosan and Malayo-Polynesian. Formosan is the group of (non-Chinese) languages found on the island of Taiwan, and includes 23 languages (SIL 1996).