The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples of the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia, going well into the Malay peninsula. Cambodia, Vietnam and the Chinese islandHainan serve as the northwest geographic outlier. Malagasy is spoken in the island of Madagascar located off the eastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Part of the language family shows a strong influence of Sanskrit and Arabic as the western part of the region has been a stronghold of Hinduism, Buddhism and, later, Islam. Two morphological characteristics of the Malayo-Polynesian languages are a system of affixation and the reduplication '' to form new words. Like other Austronesian languages, they have small phonemic inventories; thus a text has few but frequent sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters. Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number.
The term "Malayo-Polynesian" was originally coined in 1841 by Franz Bopp as the name for the Austronesian language family as a whole, and until the mid-20th century, "Malayo-Polynesian" and "Austronesian" were used as synonyms. The current use of "Malayo-Polynesian" denoting the subgroup comprising all Austronesian languages outside of Taiwan was introduced in the 1970s, and has eventually become standard terminology in Austronesian studies.
Classification
Relation to Austronesian languages on Taiwan
In spite of a few features shared with the Eastern Formosan languages, there is no conclusive evidence that would link the Malayo-Polynesian languages to any one of the primary branches of Austronesian on Taiwan.
Internal classification
Malayo-Polynesian consists of a large number of small local language clusters, with the one exception being Oceanic, the only large group which is universally accepted; its parent languageProto-Oceanic has been reconstructed in all aspects of its structure. All other large groups within Malayo-Polynesian are controversial. The most influential proposal for the internal subgrouping of the Malayo-Polynesian languages was made by Robert Blust who presented several papers advocating a division into two major branches, viz. Western Malayo-Polynesian and Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian is widely accepted as a subgroup, although some objections have been raised against its validity as a genetic subgroup. On the other hand, Western Malayo-Polynesian is now generally held to be an umbrella term without genetic relevance. Taking into account the Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian hypothesis, the Malayo-Polynesian languages can be divided into the following subgroups :
The position of the recently "rediscovered" Nasal language is still unclear, but it shares most features of its lexicon and phonological history with either Lampung or Rejang. Edwards argues that Enggano is a primary branch of Malayo-Polynesian. However, this is disputed by Smith, who considers Enggano to have undergone significant internal changes, but was once much more like the other Sumatran languages in Sumatra.
The status of the Philippine languages as subgroup of Malayo-Polynesian is disputed. While many scholars support a genealogical subgroup that includes the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Reid rejects the hypothesis of a single Philippine subgroup, but instead argues that the Philippine branches represent first-order subgroups directly descended from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian.
The Greater North Borneo hypothesis, which unites all languages spoken on Borneo except for the Barito languages together with the Malayo-Chamic languages, Rejang and Sundanese into a single subgroup, was first proposed by Blust and further elaborated by Smith.
Greater North Borneo
*North Borneo
**Northeast Sabah
**Southwest Sabah
**North Sarawak
*Kayan–Murik
*Land Dayak
*Malayo-Chamic
*Moken
*Rejang
*Sundanese
Because of the inclusion of Malayo-Chamic and Sundanese, the Greater North Borneo hypothesis is incompatible with Adelaar's Malayo-Sumbawan proposal. Consequently, Blust explicitly rejects Malayo-Sumbawan as a subgroup. The Greater North Borneo subgroup is based solely on lexical evidence.
Smith (2017)
Based on a proposal initially brought forward by Blust as an extension of the Greater North Borneo hypothesis, Smith unites several Malayo-Polynesian subgroups in a "Western Indonesian" group, thus greatly reducing the number of primary branches of Malayo-Polynesian:
