35 Southeast Asian islands and Oceania: Austronesian linguistic history

The Austronesian languages are distributed around more than half of the world's circumference and began their dispersal from Taiwan about 4,500 years ago. This became the greatest oceanic migration episode in history, spanning more than four thousand years until settlers eventually reached the far islands of Polynesia.

Keywords: linguistics; Asia; Holocene; Southeast Asia, Oceania, Austronesian