Page 153 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

Awareness of the situation and an appreciation of why it is significant is needed to
help initiate efforts to prevent language extinction and thereby protect and document the
cultural and linguistic legacy of humanity.

Language Families and Language Areas
This section explores the question of how the many languages in the seven countries above
are related genealogically to each other and how related languages form language areas.
The identification of language families is made using the methods of comparative
historical linguistics. This branch of linguistics compares the lexicons of different languages
in order to determine the degree of relatedness so that a genealogical family tree can be
produced. A family tree allows us to trace back present day languages to some ancestral
language. The name given to such ancestral languages is usually proto-language. Proto-
languages are the parent languages of groups of related present day languages. The
branches of a tree reflect time depth, the further towards the proto-language, the further
back in time.
Linguists have studied many of the languages in South-east Asia and the Pacific and
now have a reliable picture of the family tree for Austronesian languages. There are still
some differences over details of this, but the following explanation is widely used.
The parent language of all Austronesian languages is called Proto-Austronesian.
This language is hypothesized as there are no written records from this far back in time,
approximately four or five thousand years ago. Proto-Austronesian gave rise to a number
of sub-groups in Formosa which is thought to be the ancestral homeland of Austronesian,
and the sub-groups Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and Proto-Oceanic. The languages of the
Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are descended from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. Within
this, there is a western and a central sub-group, and also a South Halmahera and West
New Guinea sub-group of Ausronesian. Meanwhile, the Austronesian languages of the
Pacific are found in an eastern group including New Guinea, the Bismark Archipelago, the
Solomon Islands, the Southern New Hebrides, the Loyalty Islands and New Caledonia.
There is also an eastern group which includes most of the languages of the greater Pacific.

Distribution Map of Austronesian language family
The Austronesian language family is the biggest family in the world based on numbers
of languages. There are approximately 1,200 Austronesian languages (Malmkjær,
2009, Moseley et al., 2010). It also covers the widest area in terms of its geographical

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