| Malayo-Polynesian | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Southeast Asia and the Pacific |
| Genetic classification: |
Austronesian East Formosan Malayo-Polynesian |
| Subdivisions: | |
  The principal branches of the Malayo-Polynesian languages. |
|
The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 351 million speakers. These are widely dispersed throughout the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy is a geographic outlier, spoken in the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
A characteristic of the Malayo-Polynesian languages is a tendency to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word --e.g., wiki-wiki) to express the plural, and like other Austronesian languages they have simple phonologies; thus a text has few but frequent sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Most also have only a small set of spoken vowels, five being a common number.
The Malayo-Polynesian languages share several phonological and lexical innovations with the Eastern Formosan languages, including the leveling of proto-Austronesian *t, *C to /t/ and *n, *N to /n/, a shift of *S to /h/, and vocabulary such as *lima "five" which are not attested in other Formosan languages.
Malayo-Polynesian is divided into Western ("Hesperonesian") and Central-Eastern branches. The Western branch is a geographic grouping defined as a linguistic unit; it is describe as those Malayo-Polynesian languages which are established in Central-Eastern branch. In recent classifications with some of its languages split off in an "Outer" group as a primary branch of Malayo-Polynesian, and the rest retained in an "Inner" group within a Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian branch. These Inner and Outer groups may also be called the Borneo-Philippines languages and Sunda-Sulawesi languages, after their geographic spread.