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Its commonly use in .( Chamorro - Guam, Indonesia. Malaysia .Philippines. The Micronesian and Polynesian people) including the aboriginal Taiwanese in Taiwan . and small numbers for other Asians "without/not" genetically related to the Austronesian people . The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian people of 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.

Two morphological characteristics of the Malayo-Polynesian languages is a system of affixationand the reduplication(repetition of all or part of a word, such as wiki-wiki)to form new words. 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 vowels, five being a common number.

Languages of Malayo-PolynesianMalayo-Polynesian

The Philippine languages are spoken by 90 million people and include Tagalog(Filipino), Cebuano, Ilokano, Hiligaynon, Bikolano, andKapampangan, and Waray-Waray, each with at least three million speakers.

The most widely spoken Bornean language is Malagasy, with 20 million speakers.

The Sunda-Sulawesi languages (Nuclear languages outside Central-Eastern) are spoken by about 230 million people and include Malay(Indonesianand Malaysian), Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, Acehnese, Chamorro (of the Mariana Islands), and Palauan.

Central-Eastern includes the Oceanic languages with 2 million speakers, with mainly Western Oceanic, Southern Oceanic and Central Pacific (Polynesian and Fiji languages), such as Kuanua, Gilbertese, Hawaiian, Māori, Samoan, Tahitian, or Tongan. The 2008 analysis found three branches of Malayo-Polynesian with full support of the lexical data. These were the Philippine languages, including some languages of northern Sulawesi; Sama-Bajaw, of the Sulu Archipelago between the Philippines and Borneo; and the Indo-Melanesian languages, being all the rest. It found moderate (75%) support for Sama-Bajaw forming a unit with the Philippine languages. Within Indo-Melanesian, it found moderate (75%) support for Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian, and lesser (65%) support for the Bornean languages as a valid group.

Thus the internal structure of Malayo-Polynesian suggested by the 2008 study is:

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12y ago

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