{"title":"The Austronesian Homeland and Dispersal","authors":"R. Blust","doi":"10.1146/ANNUREV-LINGUISTICS-011718-012440","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The Austronesian language family is the second largest on Earth in number of languages, and was the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansions of the past five centuries. This alone makes the determination of its homeland a research question of the first order. There is now near-universal agreement among both linguists and archaeologists that the Austronesian expansion began from Taiwan, somewhat more than a millennium after it was settled by Neolithic rice and millet farmers from Southeast China. The first “long pause,” between the settlement of Taiwan and of the northern Philippines, may have been due to inadequate sailing technology, an obstacle that was overcome by the invention of the outrigger canoe complex. The second “long pause,” between the settlement of Fiji–Western Polynesia and of the rest of Triangle Polynesia, may also have been due to inadequate sailing technology, an obstacle that was overcome by the invention of the double-hulled canoe.","PeriodicalId":45803,"journal":{"name":"Annual Review of Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"19","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Annual Review of Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1146/ANNUREV-LINGUISTICS-011718-012440","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 19
Abstract
The Austronesian language family is the second largest on Earth in number of languages, and was the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansions of the past five centuries. This alone makes the determination of its homeland a research question of the first order. There is now near-universal agreement among both linguists and archaeologists that the Austronesian expansion began from Taiwan, somewhat more than a millennium after it was settled by Neolithic rice and millet farmers from Southeast China. The first “long pause,” between the settlement of Taiwan and of the northern Philippines, may have been due to inadequate sailing technology, an obstacle that was overcome by the invention of the outrigger canoe complex. The second “long pause,” between the settlement of Fiji–Western Polynesia and of the rest of Triangle Polynesia, may also have been due to inadequate sailing technology, an obstacle that was overcome by the invention of the double-hulled canoe.
期刊介绍:
The Annual Review of Linguistics, in publication since 2015, covers significant developments in the field of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Reviews synthesize advances in linguistic theory, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language change, biology and evolution of language, typology, as well as applications of linguistics in many domains.