Malayo-Polynesian

[ muh-ley-oh-pol-uh-nee-zhuhn, -shuhn ]

noun

1. Austronesian.

Malayo-Polynesian

noun

1. Also calledAustronesian a family of languages extending from Madagascar to the central Pacific, including Malagasy, Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, and Polynesian See also Austro-Asiatic

adjective

1. of or relating to this family of languages

Example Sentences

In the interview, McCartney also told Goldberg about his inspiration for writing the Beatles' song "Lady Madonna"—a National Geographic magazine photograph of a Malayo-Polynesian woman surrounded by three small children, one of them nursing.

From National Geographic

But one of those subfamilies, termed Malayo-Polynesian, comprises 945 of those 959 languages and covers almost the entire geographic range of the Austronesian family.

From Literature

That suggests that the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily differentiated recently out of the Austronesian family and spread far from the Austronesian homeland, giving rise to many local languages, all of which are still closely related because there has been too little time to develop large linguistic differences.

From Literature

For the location of that Austronesian homeland, we should therefore look not to Malayo-Polynesian but to the other three Austronesian subfamilies, which differ considerably more from each other and from Malayo-Polynesian than the sub-subfamilies of Malayo-Polynesian differ among each other.

From Literature

It turns out that those three other subfamilies have coincident distributions, all of them tiny compared with the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian.

From Literature