How close are Austronesian languages?

With approximately 1,200 members, the Austronesian language family includes about one-fifth of the world’s languages. Only the Niger-Congo family of Africa approaches it in number of languages, although both the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families have considerably more speakers.

Can Polynesians understand each other?

Even though most Polynesian nations are very close to each others, we also have had over 100–300 years where we couldn’t interact as much as in this modern era so each Polynesian nation had created its own specificities and this is the main reason why we cannot really understand each others when we speak our own …

What percentage of people speak Austronesian?

4.9\%
They are spoken by about 386 million people (4.9\% of the world population). This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanese, and Tagalog (Filipino).

Is Italian and Spanish mutually intelligible?

So, Spanish and Italian have a good degree of intelligibility, and this is also because of the lexical similarity between them: according to Ethnologue, they have a lexical similarity of 82\%. Due to their common origin and geographically position, you can notice that grammar is pretty similar as well.

How mutual intelligibility are Polynesian languages?

Some of the forty Polynesian languages are somewhat mutually intelligible with one another, but there will be distinct variations in pronunciation and…

Can Hawaiians and Maori understand each other?

Maori and Hawaiian are quite similar grammatically and share some vocabulary (though these will look and sound different; Maori using t and r, where Hawaiian will use k and l for example), but they are not immediately mutually intelligible.

How many people in the world speak Austronesian?

Some 270 million people are speakers of Austronesian languages (“The Austronesian Language Phylum”), living in varied countries such as China, the Philippines, Kiribati, Madagascar, Tonga, and Vietnam.

What is the phoneme inventory of the Austronesian languages?

The Austronesian languages overall possess phoneme inventories which are smaller than the world average. Around 90\% of the Austronesian languages have inventories of 19-25 sounds (15-20 consonants and 4-5 vowels), thus lying at the lower end of the global typical range of 20-37 sounds.

Are Austronesian languages agglutinative?

Austronesian languages characteristically have fairly basic grammatical systems. Evidence indicates that the entire Austric family was originally agglutinative (“Language Family Information for the Numbers List”).

What are the characteristics of the Austronesian languages?

The Austronesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word, as in wiki-wiki or agar-agar). Like many East and Southeast Asian languages, most Austronesian languages have highly restrictive phonotactics, with generally small numbers of phonemes and predominantly consonant–vowel syllables.