The Austronesian languages (/ ˌ ɔː s t r ə ˈ n iː ʒ ən /) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples).There are also a number of speakers in continental Asia. They are spoken by about 386 million people (4.9% of the world population).This makes it the fifth …

The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, …

The languages of East Timor include both Austronesian and Papuan languages. (See Timor–Flores languages and Timor–Alor–Pantar languages.)The lingua franca and national language of East Timor is Tetum, an Austronesian language influenced by Portuguese, with which it has equal status as an official language.The language of the Ocussi exclave is Uab Meto …

Quechua (/ ˈ k ɛ tʃ u ə /, US also / ˈ k ɛ tʃ w ɑː /; Spanish: ), usually called Runasimi ("people's language") in Quechuan languages, is an indigenous language family spoken by the Quechua peoples, primarily living in the Peruvian Andes. Derived from a common ancestral language, it is the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with an estimated …

Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-Aryan (c. 74%), the Dravidian (c. 24%), the Austroasiatic (c. 1.2%), or the Tibeto-Burman (c. 0.6%) families, with some languages of the Himalayas still unclassified. The SIL Ethnologue lists 461 living languages for India.. Hindustani is the most widespread language of India. The Indian census takes the widest possible definition …

Nounlessness. Salishan languages (along with the Wakashan and the extinct Chimakuan languages) exhibit predicate/argument flexibility. All content words are able to occur as the head of the predicate (including words with typically 'noun-like' meanings that refer to entities) or in an argument (including those with 'verb-like' meanings that refer to events).

Malagasy (/ m æ l ə ˈ ɡ æ s i /; Malagasy pronunciation: [maləˈɡasʲ]) is an Austronesian language and the national language of Madagascar.Malagasy is the westernmost Malayo-Polynesian language, brought to Madagascar by the settlement of Austronesian peoples from the Sunda islands around the 5th century AD. The Malagasy language is one of the Barito languages and …

Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan / ˈ juː t oʊ. æ z ˈ t ɛ k ən / or (rarely) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages.Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico.The name of the language family was created to show that it includes both the Ute language of Utah and the …

In linguistics, morphology (/ m ɔːr ˈ f ɒ l ə dʒ i /) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes.Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and …

The acquisition of the catamaran and outrigger boat technology by the non-Austronesian peoples in Sri Lanka and southern India is the result of very early Austronesian contact with the region, including the Maldives and Laccadive Islands.This is estimated to have occurred around 1000 to 600 BC and onwards, and led to the development of India and Sri Lanka's own maritime trade …