In the 17th and 18th centuries, navigators exploring the Pacific and Indian oceans discovered that the languages spoken on many islands, spanning from Madagascar in the west to Polynesia in the east, ...

Harnessing cognitive abilities of many individuals, a language evolves upon their mutual interactions establishing a persistent social environment to which language is closely attuned. Human history ...

The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, comprising over 1,200 languages spoken from Madagascar to Hawaii. Dang Liu, Albert Min-Shan Ko and Mark Stoneking collected ...

"Austronesian is the largest language family on earth: Some 1300 languages, 20% of the world's total, are spoken by 270 million people in a region that extends from Easter Island in the Pacific 10,000 ...

New research into language evolution suggests most Pacific populations originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Scientists at The University of Auckland have used sospisticated computer analyses ...