Sunda-Sulawesi languages

Article on other languages:

del.icio.us del.icio.us
Digg Digg
Furl Furl
Reddit Reddit
Rojo Rojo
Add to OnlyWire
Sunda-Sulawesi
Geographic
distribution:
Southern Thailand, southern Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Micronesia
Genetic
classification
:
Austronesian
 Malayo-Polynesian (MP)
  Nuclear MP
   Sunda-Sulawesi
Subdivisions:
17 branches (provisional)

The Sunda-Sulawesi languages (red). Not shown: Chamorro. The languages in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan are Chamic languages, and those of coastal Burma and Thailand are Moklen languages. The excluded areas of Malaya are Aslian languages, and those of Borneo and Sulawesi are Borneo-Philippine languages.

The Sunda-Sulawesi languages (or Inner Hesperonesian or Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian languages) are a branch of the Austronesian family posited in Wouk and Ross (2002). They include most of the languages of Sulawesi and the Greater Sunda Islands, as well as a few outliers such as Chamorro and Palauan.

In this proposal the previously posited clade of Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP), aka Hesperonesian, has been broken up into "inner" (Sunda-Sulawesi) and "outer" (Borneo-Philippines) clades, and Western Malayo-Polynesian is considered merely a geographic term.

Not all the languages of Sulawesi belong to the Sunda-Sulawesi (Inner Hesperonesian) clade. The twenty languages of the northern peninsula of Sulawesi and neighboring islands to the north are instead part of the Borneo-Philippines branch (Outer Hesperonesian).

Classification

There are a number of small, closely related clusters of languages in the Sunda-Sulawesi family whose interrelationship remains uncertain. Grouped by geography, they are:

(Central and southern Sulawesi)

(Greater Sunda Islands, listed from west to east)

(Pacific islands)

References

  • Fay Wouk and Malcolm Ross (ed.), The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Australian National University, 2002.

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.