page_title: Urheimat
section_title: Austronesian
hierarchical_section_title: Urheimat / Austronesian
caption_attribution_description: English: Map outlining migratory paths of Austronesian speaking populations, including estimated dates. Adapted from Benton et al., (2012)
context_page_description: In historical linguistics, an Urheimat is the area of origin of the speakers of a proto-language, the parent language of a group of languages assumed to be genetically related.
  Depending on the age of the language family under consideration, its homeland may be known with near-certainty or it may be very uncertain. The reconstruction of a prehistorical homeland makes use of a variety of disciplines, including archaeology and archaeogenetics.
context_section_description: The homeland of the Austronesian languages is widely accepted by linguists to be in what is now Taiwan. On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native Formosan languages. According to Blust (1999), the Formosan languages form nine of the ten primary branches of the Austronesian language family. Comrie (2001:28) noted this when he wrote:
  ... the internal diversity among the... Formosan languages... is greater than that in all the rest of Austronesian put together, so there is a major genetic split within Austronesian between Formosan and the rest... Indeed, the genetic diversity within Formosan is so great that it may well consist of several primary branches of the overall Austronesian family.
  Archaeological evidence (e.g., Bellwood 1997) suggests that speakers of pre-Proto-Austronesian spread from the South Chinese mainland to Taiwan at some time around 6000 BCE. Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that it is from this island that seafaring peoples migrated, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages (Diamond 2000). It is believed that this migration began around 4000 BCE (Blust 1999). However, evidence from historical linguistics cannot bridge the gap between those two periods.
  It is possible that the ancient Taiwan aborigines were related to the ancient Minyue, derived in ancient times from the southeast coast of Mainland China, as suggested by linguists Li Jen-Kuei and Robert Blust. It is suggested that in the southeast coastal regions of China, there were many sea nomads during the Neolithic era and they may have spoken ancestral Austronesian languages, and were skilled seafarers.
  The specific origins of the most far flung member of this language family, the Malagasy language of Madagascar off the coast of Africa, are described above in the part of this article concerning African languages.
  The Austro-Tai hypothesis suggests a common origin for the Austronesian languages and the Tai–Kadai languages whose hypothesized place of origin is geographically close to Taiwan.
  The Malagasy language of Madagascar is not related to nearby African languages, instead being the westernmost member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The similarity between Malagasy and Malay and Javanese was noted as long ago as 1708 by the Dutch scholar Adriaan van Reeland. Malagasy is related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and more closely with the Southeast Barito group of languages spoken in Borneo except for its Polynesian morphophonemics.
caption: The Austronesian Expansion
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