Formosan languages - Definition and Overview

The Formosan languages are a group of Austronesian languages spoken by 2% of the population of Taiwan, almost exclusively aboriginals. They include: Rukai, Tao (Yami), Tsou, Saisiyat, Atayal (Tayal), Paiwan, Bunun, Amis, Puyuma, Pazeh, Kanakanavu, Saaroa, Seediq, Kavalan. Nowadays, 2% of the Taiwanese population speaks these languages.

Some scholars hypothesize ancient Formosan languages to have been ancestral to other Austronesian languages, an idea adopted in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

The modern population of Chinese origin began to migrate to the island circa 1650. They spoke dialects of Hakka and Southern Min, the Taiwanese variety of which came to be known as Taiwanese. Many Formosan-speaking populations underwent and are still undergoing language shift between aboriginal languages and Chinese, in some cases with Japanese in between.

External links

• Reed Institute- vocabularies of the dialects spoken by the aborigines of formosa (http://academic.reed.edu/formosa/lingtables/ling_index.htm)
• A proposed genetic map (http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/genetics/AustronesianLanguageMap.gif)
• Academia Sinica's Formosan Language Archive project (http://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/formosan/en/intro.htm)