Rumpun bahasa Sulawesi

Bahasa di bagian tengah dan selatan pulau Sulawesi kehilangan pola ini. Wouk dan Ross (2002) argued from this that Sulawesi was the center of dispersal for a group of languages which share this loss, which they call Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian. They leave Gorontalo, Sangiric, and Minahasan outside their Nuclear MP, and the various other Sulawesi families as primary branches of Nuclear MP. Adelaar and Himmelmann (2005) go further and classify Gorontalo, Sangiric, and Minahasan as Philippine languages, with Gorontalo in a "Greater Central Philippine" branch along with Tagalog.