Austronesian languages

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

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Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/austronesian-languages

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. How big is Austronesian languages?Taiwan
2. What is the number of languages?Estimated at over 1,200, making it one of the largest families globally
3. What is the estimated time of origin?Around 3500 BCE for Proto-Austronesian
4. Where did the Austronesian languages start?The ancestor language, Proto-Austronesian, is thought to have come from Taiwan around 3500 BCE.
5. How did people spread across the oceans?Speakers used boats and clever navigation to travel from Taiwan all the way to places like Madagascar, Easter Island, and New Zealand.

Proto-Austronesian: The hypothetical ancestral language from which all Austronesian languages are descended.
Linguistic Reconstruction: The scientific process of determining the features of a lost ancestral language based on its descendants.
Affixation: The process of adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes to a word to change its meaning or grammatical function.
Reduplication: The repetition of a part of a word, or the entire word, to convey grammatical information.