Austronesian Languages - Distant Relations

Distant Relations

Genealogical links have been proposed between Austronesian and various families of East and especially Southeast Asia.

Austric

A link with the Austro-Asiatic languages in an 'Austric' phylum is based mostly on typological evidence. There is also morphological evidence of a connection between the conservative Nicobarese languages and Austronesian languages of the Philippines. Paul K. Benedict extended the Austric proposal to include the Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien families, but this has not been followed by other linguists.

Austro-Tai

A competing Austro-Tai proposal linking Austronesian and Tai–Kadai is supported by Weera Ostapirat, Roger Blench, and Laurent Sagart, and is based on the traditional comparative method. Ostapirat (2005) proposes a series of regular correspondences linking the two families and assumes a primary split, with Tai–Kadai speakers being the Austronesians who stayed behind in their Chinese homeland. Blench (2004) suggests that, if the connection is valid, the relationship is unlikely to be one of two sister families. Rather, he suggests that proto-Tai–Kadai speakers were Austronesians who migrated to Hainan Island and back to the mainland from the northern Philippines, and that their distinctiveness results from radical restructuring following contact with Hmong–Mien and Sinitic. Sagart's 2005 proposal (Sagart 2005), which may have some support from human population genetics (Li 2005), is that proto-Tai–Kadai was an early Austronesian language that may have back-migrated from northeastern Taiwan to the southeastern coast of China. The apparently cognate words in Tai–Kadai and Austronesian might be explained either as commonly inherited vocabulary, or as loanwords from this hypothetical (but perhaps Malayo-Polynesian) language into proto-Tai–Kadai. Sagart also suggests that Austronesian, in which he includes Tai–Kadai, is ultimately related to the Sino-Tibetan languages and probably has its origin in a Neolithic community of the coastal regions of prehistoric North China or East China.

Sino-Austronesian

French linguist and Sinologist Laurent Sagart considers the Austronesian languages to be related to the Sino-Tibetan languages, and also groups the Tai–Kadai languages as more closely related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages. He also groups the Austronesian languages in a recursive-like fashion, placing Tai–Kadai as a sister branch of Malayo-Polynesian.

Japanese

A few linguists have proposed that Japanese may be a distant relative of the Austronesian family, but this is rejected by all mainstream linguistic specialists. The evidence for any sort of connection is slight, and many linguists think it is more plausible that Japanese might have instead been influenced by Austronesian languages, perhaps by an Austronesian substratum. Those who propose this scenario suggest that the Austronesian family once covered the islands to the north of Formosa (western Japanese areas such as the Ryūkyū Islands and Kyūshū) as well as to the south. However, there is no genetic evidence for an especially close relationship between speakers of Austronesian languages and speakers of Japonic languages, so if there was any prehistoric interaction between them, it is likely to have been one of simple cultural exchange without significant ethnic mixing. In fact, genetic analyses consistently show that the Ryukyuans between Taiwan and the main islands of Japan are genetically less similar to the Taiwanese aborigines than are the Japanese, which suggests that if there was any interaction between proto-Austronesian and proto-Japonic, it occurred on the mainland prior to the extinction of Austronesian languages on mainland China and the introduction of Japonic to Japan, not in the Ryukyus. More commonly, Japanese is placed in the Altaic language family, though this has never been satisfactorily demonstrated.

Ongan

It has recently been proposed that the Austronesian and the Ongan protolanguage are the descendants of an Austronesian–Ongan protolanguage (Blevins 2007).