Malayo-Polynesian

American  

[muh-ley-oh-pol-uh-nee-zhuhn, -shuhn] / məˈleɪ oʊˌpɒl əˈni ʒən, -ʃən /

noun

1. Austronesian.

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Malayo-Polynesian British  

noun

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

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adjective

1. of or relating to this family of languages

Example Sentences

Though situated on an island, they live in a mountainous, thickly wooded area of rain forest, have never seen the sea and have no word for it in their strange Malayo-Polynesian language.

From Time Magazine Archive

Its people are not African, being predominantly of Malayo-Polynesian stock.

From Time Magazine Archive

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 "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

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

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

An institution thoroughly suggestive of Malayo-Polynesian sociology is that of fadi or tabu, which enters into every sphere of human activity.

From Man, Past and Present by Haddon, Alfred Court