The dispersal of Austronesian languages in Island South East Asia: Current findings and debates

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reviews the “standard” view of the Austronesian language family tree in connection with the archeological “farming/language dispersal” hypothesis of Neolithic populations moving into Island South East Asia (ISEA) and beyond. It focuses on what is currently known about the dispersal history of the ~650 languages spoken in ISEA (Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Timor‐Leste) that belong to the Malayo‐Polynesian branch of Austronesian and points out where the topology of the MP branch is agreed upon and where it is contested. The conclusion is that historical linguistics is currently not in the position to provide information about higher order temporal and spatial relations between speaker groups within ISEA, unlike that which the language/farming dispersal hypothesis suggests. It also reviews some claims that can be heard in support of this hypothesis and concludes (i) that the expansion of MP languages into ISEA was less monolithic than often suggested, but rather that their lexical and structural diversity suggests multiple migrations of different groups, in many different directions, at different points in time; (ii) that the history of MP languages very likely involved long‐term, intense contact in multilingual communities where newcomers and autochthonous people lived together for centuries if not millennia; (iii) that the original populations of Island SE Asia were not (only) hunter–gatherers but had sea‐faring groups and agriculturalists among them; and (iv) that the histories reflected in languages, archeological findings and human genetics do not always converge. Simple macro‐level models like the standard Austronesian tree and the farming/language dispersal hypotheses are unable to catch the linguistic history of ISEA, with its complex geography, human networks, and migrations. To deepen our understanding of this history, the focus is currently shifting from macro‐level hypotheses to more detailed bottom‐up investigations of regional MP language groups and their speakers.