Austronesian languages in the context of "Malagasy language"

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo; [ɲihoŋɡo] ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide.

The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as Ainu, Austronesian, Koreanic, and the now discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals have gained any widespread acceptance.

Most information about Taiwan before the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in 1624 comes from archaeological finds throughout the island. The earliest evidence of human habitation dates back 20,000 to 30,000 years, when lower sea levels exposed the Taiwan Strait as a land bridge. Around 5,000 years ago, farmers from what is now the southeast coast of China settled on the island. These people are believed to have been speakers of Austronesian languages, which dispersed from Taiwan across the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The current Taiwanese aborigines are believed to be their descendants.

The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, parts of mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, and the Torres Strait Islands. The nations and territories predominantly populated by Austronesian-speaking peoples are sometimes known collectively as Austronesia.

The group originated from a prehistoric seaborne migration, known as the Austronesian expansion, from Taiwan, circa 3000 to 1500 BCE. Austronesians reached the Batanes Islands in the northernmost Philippines by around 2200 BCE. They used sails some time before 2000 BCE. In conjunction with their use of other maritime technologies (notably catamarans, outrigger boats, lashed-lug boats, and the crab claw sail), this enabled phases of rapid dispersal into the islands of the Indo-Pacific, culminating in the settlement of New Zealand c. 1250 CE. During the initial part of the migrations, they encountered and assimilated (or were assimilated by) the Paleolithic populations that had migrated earlier into Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea. They reached as far as Easter Island to the east, Madagascar to the west, and New Zealand to the south. At the furthest extent, they might have also reached the Americas.

The Malay Archipelago is the archipelago between Mainland Southeast Asia and Australia, and is also called Insulindia or the Indo-Australian Archipelago. The name was taken from the 19th-century European concept of a Malay race, later based on the distribution of Austronesian languages. It has also been called the "Malay world", "Nusantara", and the "East Indies" over time. The name is controversial in Indonesia due to its ethnic connotations and colonial undertones, which can overshadow the country's diverse cultures.

Situated between the Indian and Pacific oceans, the archipelago of over 25,000 islands and islets is the largest archipelago by area and fifth by number of islands in the world. It includes Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia (specifically East Malaysia), Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Singapore. The term is largely synonymous with Maritime Southeast Asia.

Malay (UK: /məˈleɪ/ mə-LAY, US: /ˈmeɪleɪ/ MAY-lay; endonym: Bahasa Melayu, Jawi script: بهاس ملايو) is an Austronesian language spoken primarily by Malays in several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. The language is an official language of Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore. Indonesian, a standardized variety of Malay, is the official language of Indonesia and one of the working languages of Timor-Leste. Malay is also spoken as a regional language of ethnic Malays in Indonesia, southeast Philippines and the southern part of Thailand. Altogether, it is spoken by 60 million people across Maritime Southeast Asia.

The language is pluricentric and a macrolanguage, i.e., a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties, or dialect continuum, that have no traditional name in common, and which may be considered distinct languages by their speakers. Several varieties of it are standardized as the national language (bahasa kebangsaan or bahasa nasional) of several nation states with various official names: in Malaysia, it is designated as either Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language") or in some instances, Bahasa Malaysia ("Malaysian language"); in Singapore and Brunei, it is called Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language") where it in the latter country refers to a formal standard variety set apart from its own vernacular dialect; in Indonesia, an autonomous normative variety called Bahasa Indonesia ("Indonesian language") is designated the bahasa persatuan/pemersatu ("unifying language" or lingua franca) whereas the term "Malay" (bahasa Melayu) refers to vernacular varieties of Malay indigenous to areas of Central to Southern Sumatra and West Kalimantan as the ethnic languages of Malay in Indonesia.

The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used by various languages in several language families in South, East and Southeast Asia: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Tai. They were also the source of the dictionary order (gojūon) of Japanese kana.

The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct language families, among which the largest are:

• Niger–Congo, which include the large Atlantic-Congo and Bantu branches in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa.
• Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel.
• Saharan, Nilotic and Central Sudanic languages (grouped under the hypothetical Nilo-Saharan macro-family), are present in East Africa and Sahel.
• Austronesian languages are spoken in Madagascar and parts of the Comoros.
• Khoe–Kwadi languages are spoken mostly in Namibia and Botswana.
• Indo-European languages, while not indigenous to Africa, are spoken in South Africa and Namibia (Afrikaans, English, German) and are used as lingua francas in Liberia and the former colonies of the United Kingdom (English), former colonies of France and of Belgium (French), former colonies of Portugal (Portuguese), former colonies of Italy (Italian), former colonies of Spain (Spanish) and the current Spanish territories of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands and the current French territories of Mayotte and La Réunion.

There are several other small families and language isolates, as well as creoles and languages that have yet to be classified. In addition, Africa has a wide variety of sign languages, many of which are language isolates.

Native languages of Oceania fall into three major geographic groups:

• The large Austronesian language family, with such languages as Malay (Indonesian), Tagalog (Filipino), and Polynesian languages such as Māori and Hawaiian
• The various Aboriginal Australian language families, including the large Pama–Nyungan family
• The various Papuan language families of New Guinea and neighbouring islands, including the large Trans–New Guinea family

Contact between Austronesian and Papuan resulted in several instances in mixed languages such as Maisin.

The population of Taiwan is approximately 23.36 million as of April 2025.

Immigration of Han Chinese to the Penghu Islands started as early as the 13th century. The main island was inhabited by a diversity of Taiwanese indigenous peoples speaking Austronesian languages until Han settlement began in the early 17th century, around the time of the Ming–Qing transition, when workers were mainly imported from Minnan region to the colony of Dutch Formosa in the southwest of Taiwan. According to governmental statistics, in the early 21st century, 95% to 97% of Taiwan's population are Han Taiwanese, while about 2.3% are Taiwanese of Austronesian ethnicity. Half the population are followers of one or a mixture of 25 recognized religions.