Language and Linguistics Compass 5/8 (2011): 538550, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2011.00297.

Austronesian: A Sleeping Giant?

Robert Blust*
University of Hawaii

Abstract

The Austronesian (AN) language family contains nearly 20% of the worlds languages, and extends more than halfway around the globe, from Madagascar to Easter Island. The more than 1200 historically attested languages in this family are descended from an ancestor that probably was spoken on Taiwan between 5500 and 6000 years ago. In the course of the AN diaspora over a period of several millennia these languages have come into contact with many others, and because of both contact and internal dynamics of change, have developed a wide variety of innovative typological features. Despite the great potential that they offer the general typologist or theoretician, and the considerable quantity of specialist literature that now exists, AN languages have remained surprisingly marginal in generalist discussions of the nature of language and of language change.

1. Introduction In what follows I present a brief overview of the size and phylogenetic structure of the Austronesian (AN) language family, and of the typological diversity of its member languages. Other topics that are touched on briey include the question of the AN homeland, the correlation of language size and geographical location, major languages, and historical change. A major theme running throughout is that AN has played a far smaller role in the development of linguistic theory than one might expect for a family that contains nearly 20% of the worlds languages. 2. Size There are at least two ways that the size of a language family can be measured. One is by number of speakers. By this measure Indo-European is the worlds largest language family, with around 1.7 billion speakers, followed by Sino-Tibetan, with perhaps 1.2 billion. A second way is by number of languages. By this measure the Niger-Congo language family reportedly is the worlds largest, with some 1532 languages, AN is second with 1257, and the still poorly documented Trans-New Guinea group a distant third, with 477 (Ethnologue web version, 16th edition, Language family index; <http://www.ethnologue. com/web.asp>). Given the problems that inevitably arise in trying to consistently distinguish language from dialect, and in the treatment of dialect chains, these numbers clearly are approximations. Nonetheless they show that the AN language family is a giant, containing nearly 20% of the worlds languages. In contrast, the total number of speakers is around 380 million, or 5.5% of the world total. About 99% of these live in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and the Malagasy Republic, with nearly one-sixth being rst language speakers of Javanese. Since there are many language families that are far smaller than AN one might ask what factors determine number of languages. Like all things in nature, languages change over
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time. Other things being equal, if a population is sedentary, continuing to reside for scores or even hundreds of generations in a restricted geographical area, levels of communication between communities will remain relatively high and so act to retard linguistic fragmentation. If a population is highly mobile, spreading rapidly over large distances lines of communication grow weaker relatively soon, and the changes that take place in widely separated communities are more likely to produce distinct languages and less nesting of subgroups over similar temporal intervals. A second factor relevant to determining number of languages within a family is time-depth. It is widely recognized that the accumulation of changes is greater with longer passages of time, and so produces greater differences between related languages. However, for mobile populations increased time-depth is also likely to increase the proliferation of daughter languages from a parent community, since the longer a migratory pattern continues the greater its territorial expansion will be. Finally, the territory that a single language occupies correlates closely with degree of sociopolitical integration: in societies that have strong centralized authority one language group may occupy a very large territory, while in societies with little centralization of authority fragmentation is the norm, as on the island of New Guinea, which contains over 750 Papuan languages and over 100 AN languages in an area roughly the size of France. The AN language family owes its size to all of these factors in varying degrees. The name Austronesian is formed from Greek roots meaning southern islands, since the areas occupied are largely insular, and most are located south of the Equator. To populate an island world good sailing skills are needed, and these were acquired through the early invention of the outrigger canoe, a technical achievement that transformed the seas from barriers to highways, and won the admiration of early European voyagers in the Pacic (Blust 1999; Haddon and Hornell 193639; Pawley and Pawley 1994). 3. Origin Patterns of linguistic diversity place the AN homeland on the island of Taiwan, and a rich corpus of linguistic reconstructions shows that speakers of Proto-Austronesian (PAN) lived in sedentary villages of stilt houses, grew rice and millet, domesticated dogs, pigs and chickens, practiced loom weaving, and made pottery (Blust 1976a, 1984 85, 1995). Since the earliest archeological evidence for Neolithic cultures in Taiwan begins about 5500 BP it is generally considered safe to assume that PAN was spoken by 5500 BP or slightly earlier (Bellwood 1997, 2002; Pawley 2002; Tsang 2005). From this location movements into the Philippines began after 4500 BP, introducing rice, millet, domesticated animals and pottery, rst into northern Luzon and then very rapidly into areas further to the south; in subsequent centuries continuing contact between Taiwan and the northern Philippines also introduced Taiwan jade into the Batanes islands and northern Luzon (Bellwood 1997, 2002: 211ff; Bellwood and Dizon 2005). Although the movement from the AN homeland to the northern Philippines took more than a millennium, the AN diaspora outside Taiwan appears to have been both rapid and steady, with one major stop: a long pause of over a millennium in the triangle formed by Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa before the settlement of central and eastern Polynesia (Pawley 1996). One plausible view is that the two long pauses in AN culture history are related to innovations in sailing technology (Blust 1999). Until sometime after 4500 BP, then, AN languages appear to have been conned to the island of Taiwan. At this stage of its development, the language family must have been relatively small both in number of languages and in geographical scope. Once AN speakers reached the northern Philippines, however, these features changed rapidly.
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540 Robert Blust

Within a century or two AN-speaking settlements probably were scattered over much of the Philippines, and in another century or two were found over much of Indonesia. By 3500 BP the Mariana islands had been settled by ancestral Chamorro speakers, evidently from a location somewhere in the central or northern Philippines (Blust 2000a), and by about 3350 BP AN-speaking peoples bearing the distinctive Lapita culture complex had reached the western Pacic, where they came into contact with well-entrenched speakers of Papuan languages (Kirch 1997). Within two or three more centuries they had reached Fiji and western Polynesia. Given the rates at which languages typically change, then, it is likely that in the period 40003000 BP speakers of closely related AN languages were scattered over much of insular Southeast Asia and parts of the western and central Pacic. Although hereditary rank is found in a number of AN-speaking societies, and probably was present from an early time, far-reaching sociopolitical integration of the kind represented by say, the Roman Empire, was absent. The rapid movement of small-scale societies over large water intervals for a period in excess of four millennia thus sufced to leave behind a remarkably large number of languages in its wake. Given this history it is also not surprising that prior to the European colonial expansions of the past ve centuries AN had the largest territorial expanse of any language family, spanning 206 of longitude from Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, to Easter Island (Rapanui), some 2200 miles west of Chile in the eastern Pacic, and some 72 of latitude from northern Taiwan to southern New Zealand. 4. Language Distribution In plotting the distribution of AN languages by size it quickly becomes apparent that there is a strong west-to-east cline, with the largest languages in western Indonesia and the Philippines, and a steady decrease in moving eastward into Melanesia, with a slight spike again in Polynesia. About two dozen AN languages in insular Southeast Asia and Madagascar have speaker populations that number in the millions, while this is true of no language in eastern Indonesia or the Pacic. Many AN languages in Melanesia have only 100300 speakers, but Fijian, and some Polynesian languages, including Tongan, Samoan and Tahitian, have speaker populations in excess of 100,000. Despite their small sizes most AN languages of Melanesia are not as endangered as larger languages that are more directly in competition with the language of a dominant population, as Hawaiian, New Zealand Maori, or many of the aboriginal languages of Taiwan. Other features of language distribution that are noteworthy are the presence of extensive dialect chains or networks in several areas. This is true of most of the central Philippines, which shows far less linguistic diversity than either the northern or southern extremities of this archipelago, despite an equally long history of settlement by AN speakers, thus suggesting that a signicant prehistoric episode of language leveling may have occurred. Much of central Micronesia, from Sonsorol and Tobi islands in the west to Chuuk some 1500 miles to the east, form the longest dialect chain on earth. One widely accepted hypothesis about the structure of this dialect chain is that mutual intelligibility between adjacent communities was maintained if the islands in question were within reach of one another by an overnight voyage (Marck 1986). 5. Major Languages By virtue of their role as national languages in the largest AN-speaking nations, both Malay and Tagalog must be regarded as major languages. Certain observations suggest that
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the leading role these two languages have come to play was determined at least in part by factors of geography. The rst Dutch expedition to insular Southeast Asia arrived in what is now Indonesia in 1595, and it was quickly recognized that a simplied form of Malay could be used in most important ports. When trade and cultural exchange between India and China began in earnest about 2000 years ago, the easiest route of communication was by sea rather than by following the overland route across or around the Himalayas. The safest sea route through Southeast Asia follows the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and the principal indigenous language spoken on both sides of this strait was Malay. Although we lack documentary support for this inference, Malay-speaking merchants must have been drawn into the IndiaChina trade network, since they worked the strait through which this trade had to pass. Inscriptions on stone from the late seventh century show that Malay was the language of the Indianized state of Srivijaya in southern Sumatra, a major cultural center that also controlled much of the trade passing from the Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia through the Strait of Malacca to India and beyond. By the time the Dutch arrived many centuries later Malay was an important lingua franca, and when the Netherlands East Indies became the Republic of Indonesia on August 17, 1945, Malay was made the basis of the new national language, called Bahasa Indonesia. For somewhat different reasons Malay also became the national language of both Malaysia (Bahasa Malaysia) and Brunei (Bahasa Kebangsaan; lit. national language), and it is one of the four ofcial languages of Singapore. The rise of Tagalog to national status has a somewhat parallel history. Shortly after the Spanish arrived in the Philippines they established a trans-Pacic trade network that brought Peruvian and Mexican silver to the Philippines to exchange with Fukienese merchants for Chinese silks and other products from the Far East. Although it was initially established on Cebu island in the central Philippines in 1565, the galleon trade was transferred to Manila in 1572 on account of the superior anchorage afforded by Manila Bay, and after this these annual mercantile voyages were known as the Manila galleon. Since the language spoken natively around Manila Bay was Tagalog, it acquired prestige as the native language of a major trade center, and when the Philippines achieved independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, Tagalog was chosen as the basis of the national language. Other major AN languages are Javanese, on account of the sheer number of speakers, and Malagasy, a national language with speakers numbering in the millions. 6. Subgrouping No serious attempts were made to subgroup the AN languages before the 1920s. Rather, the languages were spoken of as Indonesian, Melanesian, Micronesian, or Polynesian, reecting geographical rather than linguistic divisions. Within Polynesia geography and subgrouping relationship more-or-less corresponded, since only Polynesian languages are spoken within the Polynesian triangle formed by Hawaii in the north, New Zealand (Aotearoa) in the southwest, and Easter Island (Rapanui) in the southeast. However, Polynesian Outlier languages are also spoken over a large swath of Melanesia, and a small part of Micronesia. For the other three geographical regions a correspondence with linguistic subgroups does not exist. In 1927, and again more extensively in 1937, the German comparativist Otto Dempwolff showed that all AN languages east of a line running through western New Guinea, except Palauan and Chamorro, show distinctive phonological mergers which justify a subgroup that he called melanesisch, since renamed Oceanic. Despite the ambitious
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542 Robert Blust

lexicostatistical classication of Dyen (1965), little further progress was made in AN subgrouping until the 1970s. A consensus view that has emerged over the past two or three decades is that the greatest linguistic diversity within AN is found among the aboriginal languages of Taiwan. Although there are now several versions of this position (e.g., Sagart 2004; Starosta 1995), the most commonly accepted one recognizes nine primary branches among the 15 remaining Formosan aboriginal languages, and a single Malayo-Polynesian group that includes all other AN languages, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Atayalic (two languages, Taiwan) East Formosan (ve languages, three of which are extinct, Taiwan) Puyuma (one language, Taiwan) Paiwan (one language, Taiwan) Rukai (several divergent dialects; two languages?, Taiwan) Tsouic (three languages, Taiwan) Bunun (one language, Taiwan) Western Plains (ve languages, four extinct, Taiwan) Northwest Formosan (three languages, one extinct, Taiwan) Malayo-Polynesian (around 1200 languages outside Taiwan) 10.1. Western Malayo-Polynesian (500600 languages in the Philippines, western Indonesia, mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and western Micronesia) 10.2. Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (600700 languages in eastern Indonesia and the Pacic) 10.2.1. Central Malayo-Polynesian (about 120 languages in the Lesser Sunda islands and Moluccas of Indonesia) 10.2.2. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (500 languages in the northern Moluccas and Pacic islands) 10.2.2.1. South Halmahera-West New Guinea (3040 languages in the northern Moluccas and the north coast of the Birds Head peninsula of west New Guinea) 10.2.2.2. Oceanic (about 460 languages in Melanesia, most of Micronesia and Polynesia)

Within Oceanic the following groups are recognized by Lynch et al. (2002), who describe linkages as the least discrete type of subgroup and families as the most discrete: 1. The St. Matthias family (two languages, Bismarck archipelago); 2. Yapese (one language, Micronesia); 3. Admiralties family (about 30 languages, 2 extinct); 4. Western Oceanic linkage (includes 4.1. Sarmi Jayapura family, 6 languages, northern New Guinea, 4.2. North New Guinea cluster, 86 languages, 4.3. Papuan Tip cluster, 55 languages, southeast New Guinea, and 4.4. Meso-Melanesian cluster, 64 languages, Bismarck archipelago and western Solomons); 5. Central-Eastern Oceanic grouping (includes 5.1. Southeast Solomonic family, 25 languages, 5.2. Utupua-Vanikoro grouping, 6 languages, Santa Cruz archipelago, 5.3. Southern Oceanic linkage, 134 languages, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Loyalty islands, 5.4. Central Pacic linkage, 43 languages, Rotuman, Fiji and Polynesia, and 5.5. Micronesian family, 15 languages). Not all of these groups are equally certain. Malayo-Polynesian is well supported by various types of innovations, as are Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern MalayoPolynesian, and Oceanic. Western Malayo-Polynesian is far more problematic, and may represent more than one primary branch of Malayo-Polynesian (Adelaar 2005; Ross 1995). Central-Malayo-Polynesian probably was a dialect chain that allowed innovations
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to spread widely within it without encompassing the entire set of languages (Blust 2009a; Donohue and Grimes 2008). The Oceanic subgroup, rst recognized by Dempwolff more than 80 years ago, is particularly well supported (Ross et al. 1998, 2003, 2008). As noted in Blust (2009b),
Translated into Indo-European terms, the geographical distribution of primary AN subgroups is roughly equivalent to nding representatives of every primary branch of the Indo-European language family within the borders of the Netherlands.

The culture-historical implications of this family tree are evident from inspection: the principle of least moves (Dyen 1956) strongly favors Taiwan as the homeland of the AN languages. 7. Typology As might be expected in a language family of such size, enormous geographical spread, and contacts with unrelated languages, AN languages exhibit great typological variation. Syntactically perhaps the most salient feature is the presence of verb systems in which an active voice is matched by three passives, called the direct, local, and instrumental passives by Wolff (1973), who reconstructed PAN morphemes that expressed these distinctions: *-um- actor voice, *- n direct passive, *-an local passive, *Si- instrumental passive. There have been numerous alternative analyses of these Philippine-type verb systems, as they are commonly called; some have treated voice as a syntactic relationship called focus (distinct from the similar term in general linguistics), while others have classied the argument structure as ergative. Philippine-type languages are found in Taiwan, the Philippines, northern Borneo, northern Sulawesi, Madagascar, and western Micronesia (Chamorro). With few exceptions they are predicate-initial (VOS or VSO), and have very rich afxation systems. Somewhat similar kinds of verb systems which diverge further from the canonical type are found in the Batak languages of northern Sumatra, and in Old Javanese, known from palm leaf manuscripts produced from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Although some typologists, as Himmelmann (1991) have recognized the challenge that such verb systems present to received notions in general linguistic theory, discussions of Philippine-type voice systems has generally been conned to the specialist literature. Most languages of western and eastern Indonesia are SVO. Many of those in western Indonesia have a simple activepassive contrast in the verb, although it has been pointed out by a number of researchers that the passive is as frequent and unmarked as the active, and these can therefore be characterized as symmetrical voice languages (Himmelmann 2005). Many languages of the Lesser Sunda islands in eastern Indonesia lack a passive voice altogether, and some reportedly have no afxes (Klamer 2002; Verheijen 1977). Most Oceanic languages are SVO, although several dozen in the New Guinea area are SOV, almost certainly the result of contact-induced change from the numerically dominant and almost exclusively SOV Papuan languages of the New Guinea mainland. Many of these also lack a true passive construction. The Polynesian languages, Fijian, and some languages of the western Solomons are predicate-initial, but this structure probably developed from an SVO ancestor rather than directly continuing the predicate-initial structure of PAN. Even within fairly shallow subgroups such as Polynesian, some languages have an accusative case alignment system, while others are ergative.
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544 Robert Blust

Phoneme inventories vary enormously, from some of the worlds smallest (Hawaiian and other Eastern Polynesian languages, with eight consonants, and ve vowels which occur both long and short) to some that are nearly four times as large (Nemi, of New Caledonia, with 43 consonants, and 5 vowels, which occur in both oral and nasal varieties). Typical inventories in insular Southeast Asia have 1520 consonants, and four vowels i, u, a, which reect the PAN system without change (the reconstructed schwa is conventionally written *e). Those in the Pacic typically have 10 15 consonants and ve vowels (i, e, a, o, u). Many Oceanic languages have also developed historically secondary labiovelar consonants (pw, mw ). In addition to these more common types of segments, AN languages have some of the rarest types of speech sounds in the worlds languages, including bilabial trills (rapid trilling of lips) in languages of the Admiralty islands and Vanuatu (Blust 2007; Maddieson 1989a), linguo-labials (tip of tongue touching upper lip) in a number of languages in northcentral Vanuatu (Maddieson 1989b), and true voiced aspirates (single speech sounds that sound like clusters [bp], [dt], [gk], or [bph], [dth], [gkh],) in Kelabit and Lun Dayeh of northern Sarawak, Borneo (Blust 2006). Pronouns will be treated more fully in Section 8, History, but from a purely typological standpoint it is noteworthy that nearly all AN languages have a rst person inclusive exclusive distinction, and that many Oceanic languages distinguish singular, dual, paucal, and plural pronouns. Although dual and paucal pronouns are rare in insular Southeast Asia, the most fully developed pronominal number systems are found in Kenyah languages of central Borneo, some of which distinguish singular, dual, trial, quadral, and plural (Blust 2009b: 3078). Pronominal gender is almost absent, having been reported only in a handful of languages spoken by nomadic groups in central Borneo, and in scattered parts of Melanesia, where it may be due to Papuan contact. In several languages of central Borneo male speakers distinguish masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, but female speakers reportedly distinguish only human and non-human (Sellato 1981). In counting, most AN languages use an inherited decimal system, reecting PAN * sa isa one, *duSa two, *t lu three, S pat four, *lima ve, * n m six, *pitu seven, *walu eight, *Siwa nine, *sa-puluq ten, but a number of deviations from this are found in Melanesia, and a scattering of non-decimal systems is found elsewhere. Counting systems that deviate from the fully decimal pattern vary widely, from imperfect decimal systems (1 ) 5, 5 + 1, 5 + 2, 5 + 3, 5 + 4, 10) in languages such as Pazeh of central Taiwan or Ilongot of the northern Philippines, to quinary systems (1 ) 5, 5 + 1, 5 + 2, 5 + 3, 5 + 4, 5 + 5) in languages like Anejom or Lenakel of southern Vanuatu, to systems that employ subtraction, multiplication, or both, as Yapese of western Micronesia (1 ) 6, 10 ) 3, 10 ) 2, 10 ) 1, 10), or Lio of the Lesser Sundas in Indonesia (1 ) 5, 5 + 1, 5 + 2, 2 4, 10 ) 1, 10). In addition to general counting systems some languages have a set of numerals formed by Ca- reduplication used to count [+human] referents. Systems of numeral classiers are richly developed in western Indonesia, and in a number of Oceanic languages. Historically the most stable classier is a reex of *buaq fruit, which is used for large roundish objects (house, car, etc.) in languages such as Malay, but has become the default numeral classier in many Oceanic languages, and is fossilized in the numeral bases of some South Halmahera-West New Guinea and Oceanic languages, as with Taba (southern Halmahera) pso one, plu two, ptol three, phot four, plim ve, etc., where it is reected by a preposed p, or Loniu (Admiralty islands, western Melanesia) sih one, ma/uoh two, macoloh three, mahah four, malimeh ve, etc., where it is reected by postposed h.
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e e

Austronesian: A Sleeping Giant? 545

8. History Several features of the history of AN languages have already been noted. As stated earlier, the distribution of primary subgroups is most simply explained by assuming that PAN was spoken in Taiwan by 5500 BP, and the distribution of typological features over these subgroups strongly suggests that PAN was a Philippine-type language. Space will allow only a few more observations about historical development. Blust (1977) and Ross (2006) have reconstructed a PAN pronoun system. Ross reconstruction accounts better for Formosan evidence, but involves complications than cannot adequately be discussed here. A phonologically modied form of the reconstruction proposed by Blust, which is perhaps better assigned to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, appears as Table 1. Long form pronouns marked agents of actor voice verbs if they were preceded by *i or *si, and probably marked patients if they were not, while short form pronouns marked genitive case and agents of non-actor voice verbs (reexes often include a preceding genitive marker that has fused with the pronominal base). As noted above, nearly all languages preserve the inclusive exclusive distinction in the rst person plural, as with Malay kita we (including addressee) vs. kami we (excluding addressee). Many Philippine languages reect *kita as we (dual), presumably because the most frequent conversational unit is a dyadic set, and over time this pragmatic feature transformed the semantics, a change that in turn necessitated the addition of some other pronominal element to create a new plural, as with Agta ikita:ikitam, Balangaw dita:ditaw, Palawan Batak kita:kitami, or Isneg da/ta:da/tada, where the rst pronoun in each set is dual and the second plural. In these languages the dual number is restricted to rst person pronouns. AN languages provide a vast laboratory for the study of sound change, and because of limitations of space I will conne my remaining remarks almost entirely to this area. Prominent patterns that recur in widely separated languages are: 1. C > __#, 2. *t > k, 3. sporadic prenasalization in the languages of island Southeast Asia, 4. a fortis lenis split in many Oceanic languages, and 5. progressive mergers as one moves eastward through the Pacic. In addition, data from AN languages has raised still unanswered questions about whether all sound change is phonetically (or phonologically) motivated. The foundation work for the study of AN comparative phonology is by Dempwolff (193438) which, however, used data only from Malayo-Polynesian languages, and which has been revised in many ways by subsequent researchers. PAN canonical shape was

Table 1. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian pronouns.

Long form pronouns sg 1 *i-aku 2 *i-ihu, *i-kahu 3 *si-ia pl 1in *i-(k)ita 1ex *i-(k)ami 2 *i-kamu 3 *si-ida *na-ta *na-mi *na-mu *na-da *ni-ku *ni-hu *ni-ia Short form pronouns

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CVCVC or CVCCVC, where consonants were optional (*laiC sky, *aNak offspring, *tiaN belly, *maCa eye, *ia 3sg., etc.), and the medial cluster was formed from the abutting consonants in a (lexicalized) reduplicated monosyllable, as with *tuktuk knock, pound, beat. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian inherited this pattern and added medial clusters of homorganically prenasalized obstruents, as with *tumbuq grow or *punti banana. Most of the 460-odd Oceanic languages have lost all nal consonants (and a number of these have subsequently lost the vowel that then became nal). In most or all Oceanic languages nal consonants appear to have disappeared abruptly through a change of the form C > __# rather than through a series of lenitions that affected stops, nasals, fricatives, and liquids independently. Blevins (2004) has suggested that this theoretically unexpected change was motivated by the reduction of all medial clusters in ProtoOceanic, leaving only open syllables in non-nal position, a structural property that was then generalized to all syllables. The only other area in which nal consonant loss is common is Sulawesi, in central Indonesia. On this island, unlike the neighboring Philippines or Borneo, nal consonant contrasts were reduced in many languages, leading to complete loss in some. Here, however, there is clear evidence that the change resulted from a series of lenitive steps (Sneddon 1993). The change *t > k is well-known only from Hawaiian, but is attested as a regular sound change in some 20 historically independent cases that affected at least 43 languages (Blust 2004). In some languages the change occurred only word-nally, as in Bipi of the Admiralty islands (*tama > tama- father, *katapa > katah frigate bird, *mata > mataeye, but *mate > mak die, dead, *kutu > kuk louse, *patu > pak stone, *kuRita > kuik octopus). Almost without exception *t > k occurred only after *k was lost in the relevant environment (POC *k disappeared in Bipi in non-initial position prior to the *t > k shift). What seems to drive this recurrent sound change is thus loss of *k, leaving only p and t in the inventory of voiceless stops, with the non-labial stop then varying freely between dental and velar places. Where this variation is resolved in favor of the velar place the change has taken place. Sporadic prenasalization of medial obstruents is found in many AN languages in island Southeast Asia, a development which directly challenges the Neogrammarian dictum that sound change is exceptionless. Moreover, it does so in a spectacular way, since the same type of irregularity is duplicated (in different morphemes) in the phonological histories of an entire population of languages. To cite a few examples, hundreds of languages reect *quda shrimp, lobster with a simple medial stop (or its lenited counterpart), as with Malay uda, Old Javanese hura, Tagalog ula. In contrast Iban, of southwest Borneo, has unda shrimp, lobster. Since all these languages have inherited both simple and prenasalized medial obstruents there is no obvious reason why the Iban word should have a preconsonantal nasal that is lacking in cognate forms. Given a single example it is easy to speculate about causes (e.g., it might be suggested that the nal nasal was a conditioning factor). However, when parallel examples of medial prenasalization are considered the appearance of a non-etymological preconsonantal nasal cannot be predicted from any environmental or other structural factor, as seen in, for example, *pus j > Malay pusat, Old Javanese pus r, Tagalog pusod, but Balinese pus d navel, *Rakit > Malay, Karo Ba tak rakit, Maranao gakit, but Toba Batak rakit ([rakkit]) raft, or *abut > Malagasy avotra plucked, rooted up, Balinese abut pull out, Tontemboan awut pull up, Nggela avu to weed, but Banjarese ambut tear off coconut husk. In some cases sporadic prenasalization could not occur until an earlier heterorganic consonant cluster had reduced or a morpheme boundary had been lost, as with *busbus (> *bubus) > Iban bumbus perforated, or *i
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kahu (> ikaw > iko) > Maloh iko 2sg. Neither conditioned sound change nor morphology can explain these random nasals, which occur unpredictably in individual lexical items across a wide range of languages in insular Southeast Asia and so present a major challenge to the Regularity Hypothesis of the Neogrammarians (Blust 1996a). In many Oceanic languages obstruent voicing and prenasalization are inseparably paired (all voiced stops are automatically prenasalized, all prenasalized stops are automatically voiced). In general these unit phonemes have arisen from earlier nasal-obstruent sequences, as seen by the constrastive development of the medial obstruents in PMP *mata Fijian mata eye, but *punti vudi ([vundi]) banana, the medial consonant in mata explifying an oral grade reex and the corresponding consonant in vudi a nasal grade reex of PMP *t. However, the source of some nasal grade reexes in Oceanic languages is obscure, as in PMP *b R k POC *boRok (not the expected **poRok) pig, or PMP *danum POC *danum (not the expected **ranum) fresh water. Moreover, in addition to oral grade nasal grade, Blust (1976b) and Ross (1988) found evidence for a third consonant grade contrast, which Ross has called a fortis-lenis distinction in the reexes of oral grade obstruents. There is currently no way to reconcile this apparently unconditioned change with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, and like the problem of sporadic medial prenasalization in the AN languages of island Southeast Asia it recurs through a large population of languages. Finally, although some of the languages of New Caledonia have very large phoneme inventories, there is a tendency within the Oceanic group for inventories to decrease along a westeast axis, mainly by consonant mergers. This is particularly true in the central and eastern Pacic: Fijian and Rotuman, at the western end of this zone, have 22 and 24 phonemes, respectively, Tongan and Samoan, in western Polynesia, have 16 and 15, respectively, Rarotongan and Tahitian, in central Polynesia, have 14 each, and Hawaiian and Rurutu in eastern Polynesia have just 13, an observation that has led some linguists to quip that if the Pacic were any wider the easternmost Polynesian languages would have ended up with few or no consonants and ve vowels. Other features of AN historical linguistics that merit at least brief notice are the theoretically challenging sound changes that occur in many languages, and the remarkably advanced state of lexical reconstruction. There are many examples of phonetically unexpected sound changes, of which Long Terawan Berawan (northern Sarawak, Borneo), *b > b-, -k-, -m, Saban (northern Sarawak) *g > j- or p-, -j-, -p, and Sundanese (west Java) *w- and some instances of *b- > c- (voiceless palatal affricate), *-w-, some instances of *-b-, and *-mb- > nc- can be cited as instances (Blust 2005). With regard to lexical reconstruction, Dempwolff (193438) posited over 2200 Uraustronesisch proto-forms, and much more work has been done over the past four decades. As of late 2010 The Polynesian Lexicon (POLLEX; http://pollex.org.nz), which was initiated by Walsh and Biggs (1966) and is now administered by Ross Clark of the University of Auckland, contained 4746 reconstructions with 55,193 reexes from 68 language communities. At the same point in time the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary or (ACD; Blust and Trussel, n.d.), which is no more than 25% complete contained 4085 reconstructed bases and 6035 total reconstructions (including afxed and reduplicated forms, and compounds) with 41,357 reexes from 672 languages. In addition, the rst three volumes of The lexicon of Proto-Oceanic (Ross et al. 1998, 2003, 2008) have appeared over the past 12 years, and it is already clear that these are among the most detailed and methodologically informed studies of a proto-lexicon ever done for any language family. e e

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548 Robert Blust

9. Conclusions Although it contains nearly 20% of the worlds languages, a great deal of typological diversity, and an extensive scientic literature dating from at least the 1860s, the AN language family has been under-utilized by linguists concerned with general theory, and poorly understood by historical linguists working in other language families. Although a considerable amount of valuable work in syntactic theory has been done by formalists whose research efforts are focused on AN languages (e.g., Mercado et al. 2010), this work has generally been conned to conference proceedings and has rarely made its way into textbook discussions. This neglect is particularly evident in introductory texts on historical linguistics, which rarely mention AN data, and when they do they often get it wrong (Blust 1996b, 2000b). Undoubtedly in part the marginal role given to AN stems from the fact that many of its languages are spoken by small and politically obscure populations far from the major centers of learning. I hope to have shown in this brief sketch that although much remains to be done in describing these languages much is already available, and far more use could be made of the descriptive materials that already exist for testing general claims about the nature of language, and processes of language change. Given its enormous size and diversity, and the still underused potential this has for testing general linguistic claims, one could well call AN a sleeping giant. Short Biography Robert Blust is a historical linguist who specializes in the Austronesian language family. He has over 200 publications in linguistics, anthropology and archaeology journals, including the rst single-authored book that offers a comprehensive introduction to the Austronesian languages as a whole (Blust 2009b). His major ongoing research projects include the 2000-page but still unnished online Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (Blust and Trussel n.d.), and a workbook on historical linguistics for the general linguistics public. Note
* Correspondence address: Robert Blust, Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Moore Hall 569, 1890 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822-2318, USA. E-mail: blust@hawaii.edu

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