austronesia

Austronesia is a biogeographic and linguistic region that covers a vast expanse of islands in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, as well as parts of Southeast Asia. The term is closely tied to the Austronesian language family, which is among the world's most widespread language groups, with roughly 1,200 languages and hundreds of millions of speakers.

Geographically, Austronesia includes Near Oceania—Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia—as well as maritime Southeast Asia and adjacent island groups. Madagascar, though located off the coast of Africa, is commonly considered part of Austronesia in linguistic terms because Malagasy belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family.

Linguistically and archaeologically, the core homeland of the Austronesian languages is widely believed to be Taiwan, from which speakers expanded south and east beginning in the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age. This expansion carried into the Philippines and Indonesia and later to western Oceania, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. The Lapita cultural complex (roughly 1600–500 BCE) is often linked to these maritime dispersals. Later voyages reached Hawaii, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), New Zealand, and other distant islands.

Today, Austronesia denotes a diverse cultural and linguistic region spanning thousands of miles of ocean and hosting numerous languages, traditions, and subsistence strategies, largely shaped by seafaring and island environments.