Austronesian Migration Across the Pacific

The Austronesian language family comprises roughly 1,200 languages spoken from Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, to Easter Island in the far eastern Pacific, making it, before European colonial expansion, the most geographically widespread language family on Earth. The "Out of Taiwan" hypothesis, developed principally by archaeologist Peter Bellwood and linguist Robert Blust, situates the Austronesian homeland in Taiwan around 3000 BCE, an inference drawn largely from the fact that the island's indigenous Formosan languages preserve, among themselves, a far greater internal diversity than the whole of the Austronesian family found beyond Taiwan - the pattern expected of a linguistic point of origin.