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| Malayo-Polynesian | ||
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| Geographic distribution: |
Southeast Asia and the Pacific | |
| Genetic classification: |
Austronesian East Formosan Malayo-Polynesian |
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| Subdivisions: |
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 The principal branches of the Malayo-Polynesian languages. |
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The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 351 million speakers. These are widely dispersed throughout the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy is a geographic outlier, spoken in the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
A characteristic of the Malayo-Polynesian languages is a tendency to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word --e.g., wiki-wiki) to express the plural, and like other Austronesian languages they have simple phonologies; thus a text has few but frequent sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Most also have only a small set of spoken vowels, five being a common number.
Classification
The Malayo-Polynesian languages share several phonological and lexical innovations with the Eastern Formosan languages, including the leveling of proto-Austronesian *t, *C to /t/ and *n, *N to /n/, a shift of *S to /h/, and vocabulary such as *lima "five" which are not attested in other Formosan languages.
For several decades, Malayo-Polynesian was divided into Western ("Hesperonesian") and Central-Eastern branches. However, the Western branch was a geographic grouping never positively defined as a linguistic unit; it was only described negatively as those Malayo-Polynesian languages which were not in the well established Central-Eastern branch. In recent classifications it has been abandoned, with some of its languages split off in an "Outer" group as a primary branch of Malayo-Polynesian, and the rest retained in an "Inner" group within a Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian branch. These Inner and Outer groups may also be called the Borneo-Philippines languages and Sunda-Sulawesi languages, after their geographic spread.
- Borneo-Philippines, Outer Western Malayo-Polynesian, or Outer Hesperonesian languages
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- These languages are spoken by about 130 million speakers and include Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Hiligaynon, Bikolano, Kapampangan, Waray-Waray, and Malagasy.
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- Sunda-Sulawesi, Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian, or Inner Hesperonesian languages
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- These languages are spoken by about 230 million speakers and include Indonesian Malay, Malaysian Malay, Sundanese, Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro, and Palau (Belau).
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