Table of Contents
The Austronesian languages form a single and relatively close-knit family, similar in its degree of internal diversity and time depth to other major language families such as Austroasiatic, Uto-Aztecan and Indo-European. Prior to AD 1500 the Austronesian languages belonged to the most widespread language family in the world, with a distribution extending more than half way around the globe from Madagascar to Easter Island. Today, Austronesian-speaking peoples comprise most or all of the indigenous populations of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Madagascar. Austronesian languages are also found on Taiwan (the possible homeland of the first Austronesians), in parts of southern Vietnam and Cambodia, in the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Burma, and on Hainan Island in southern China. Further to the east, Austronesian languages are spoken in some of the coastal areas of Papua New Guinea, in New Britain and New Ireland, and down the Melanesian chain of islands through the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu as far as New Caledonia and Fiji. From there they extend eastwards to include all of the languages of Polynesia and northwards to take in all of the languages of Micronesia.
There are estimated to be between 1000 and 1200 distinct Austronesian languages, depending on one’s criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects. These languages are spoken by an estimated 270 million people whose distribution is spectacularly uneven. All but about two million Austronesian-speakers live west of a line drawn north-south at about 130° east longitude, extending from just west of the Caroline Islands to just east of the Bird’s Head on the island of New Guinea. The distribution of these languages over the Austronesian-speaking area is, however, relatively more even, with something over 500 languages on either side of the 130° east longitudinal dividing line.
The fact that so many people should speak related Austronesian languages is interesting, but does this linguistic fact illuminate the overall cultural and biological origins and histories of these populations in any useful way? After all, the peoples who speak these languages today are not identical in physical appearance. One would have little difficulty, for instance, in differentiating by simple visual means amongst a random mixture of Austronesian-speaking individuals of Punan (Borneo), Agta (Luzon), Fijian and Tahitian origin. Similarly, the forest-collecting Punan, the urbanized Moslem Malays of Kuala Lumpur and the atoll dwellers of Micronesia would appear to have rather little in common in the socio-economic and religious senses. Culture and physical appearance might appear to be utilized as channels of ethnic identity in many individual modern societies, yet such channels are not rigid and inflexible. Even the most cursory observation of present-day societies anywhere in the world will leave little doubt that people, often large groups of them, can intermarry with people of different biological and cultural backgrounds, change their languages, or adopt new cultures and lifestyles when conditions persuade or permit.
Yet by no means all people or societies have, by choice or obligation (excluding such extreme situations as forced population movement and slavery), undergone such fundamental transitions to any marked degree. Clearly, the vast majority of individuals in most societies, in the past perhaps much more so than in the present, have ended their lives in much the same cultural mould as they began, marrying a spouse and producing offspring very similar in physical appearance and cultural background to themselves. In some societies such relative “conservatism” would appear to have dominated through history, whereas in others there have been stronger pressures to mix with other populations and to create new biological and cultural expressions.
Austronesian societies, likewise, have varied greatly in these regards in the past. Yet for all of them there exist linguistic, biological and archaeological evidence that indicate varying degrees of common origin traceable back for a time depth of perhaps 6000 years. Austronesian societies have obviously fissioned and diversified in complex ways, and this is one of the reasons why the study of these societies of Southeast Asia and Oceania, past and present, can be so intriguing and rewarding.
Sceptics[1] might question whether any shared ancestry in the cultural and biological senses is really implied for the 270 million people who speak Austronesian languages today. This question is hard to answer in any absolute way since every Austronesian society has a different history and it would be futile and divisive to allocate degrees of inherited “Austronesian-ness”. But one must surely reject any explanation for the Austronesian languages that would see them as spread ancestrally by borrowing or by convergence amongst static pre-existing populations. In other words, unmoving peoples, already highly diversified, did not simply “borrow” Austronesian languages from one another, even though instances of such transmission have probably occurred, especially in western Melanesia. Had all the Austronesian languages spread only by such means we would hardly expect to find the remarkably unbroken and enclave-free distribution pattern, relatively free of diverse substratum linguistic phenomena, which exists today in virtually all regions apart from western Melanesia and the Southeast Asian mainland.
The whole picture makes sense, and obviously so for the far-flung islands of the Pacific and Madagascar, if one accepts that the ancestral versions of the modern Austronesian languages were spread mainly by colonizing speakers. There might have been occasional exceptions to this process of spread by colonization, as we can see in the recent spreads of modern national languages such as Malay and Bahasa Indonesia. But on a whole-language-family scale with both great extent and time-depth, no other explanation apart from spread by colonization makes sense.
While the principal justification for the common Austronesian heritage is linguistic, we can also see surviving threads, despite millennia of interaction and change, in the biological and cultural arenas. For instance, the vast majority of Austronesian speakers outside Melanesia and parts of the Philippines are of “Southern Mongoloid” (or Southeast Asian) biological affiliation. Some degree of common heritage is (or was in pre-modern times) also visible in the widespread occurrence of specific cultural characteristics such as tattooing, use of outriggers on canoes, features of ethnographic and prehistoric art styles, and social characteristics such as concern with birth order of siblings and a reverence for ancestral kin group founders. Generally, however, there is little which can be characterized as exclusively or uniquely Austronesian held widely today in common across all Austronesian-speaking regions, and neither should we expect such a circumstance. We see everywhere the results of innumerable diverse transformations. The themes of this book are thus partially bipartite, focusing on shared ancestry on the one hand, and culture- and region-specific transformations on the other.