The discovery of the existence of the Austronesian language family goes back to the seventeenth century, when members of the Schouten and Lemaire expedition collected a vocabulary from East Futuna (Wallis and Futuna) in the South Pacific, some of which was found later to bear a striking resemblance to Malay. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that Austronesian studies really took on a systematic flavour, particularly with the work of Dutch linguists in what is today Indonesia and that of a number of missionaries in the South Pacific. A discussion of the history of research in Austronesian linguistics is not called for here. Suffice it to say that the major advances in Austronesian studies have been made this century, beginning with the systematic comparative work of such linguists as Stresemann (1927) and Dempwolff (1934-38). Since that time there has been a great deal of systematic research carried out right throughout the vast region where Austronesian languages are spoken.
In the past twenty-five years or so there have been a number of subgrouping hypotheses advanced by scholars of Austronesian languages. Only the most recent will be considered in any detail in this overview, for the major purpose of this paper is to present current and recent Austronesian subgrouping hypotheses, to look at what may be regarded as secure and what remains the subject of ongoing research. But before undertaking this review, it is necessary to insert a couple of preliminary remarks, one on the make-up of the Austronesian language family and the other on methodological considerations, in particular the methodology of linguistic subgrouping.
The Austronesian language family is perhaps the world’s largest, with some 1200 languages and approximately 270 million speakers, according to the most recent studies (Tryon, ed. 1994). It ranges from languages with tens of millions of speakers (Malay/Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog) to a surprisingly large number of languages with only a handful of speakers, numbered in the hundreds. These latter are particularly prevalent in Oceania, the causes for which will be examined later in this volume by Dutton. The geographical range of the Austronesian family is displayed in Map 1. A glance at the map will show that Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east. They are spoken almost universally in Indonesia and the Philippines, in Singapore and Malaysia, by the indigenous population of Taiwan, and by minority populations in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Burma (currently Myanmar). Further east, Austronesian languages occupy almost all of the islands of Oceania with the exception of the inland and most coastal areas of the great island of New Guinea (Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea).
