The following podcast contains explicit language.

From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter and what is that song that we're listening to?

That is Billy Holiday, who I don't think I've ever played on the show before.

I'm not sure why. And she's doing a sailboat in the moonlight, which is just this adorable little song which I'm using because not only is it just good, it's really holiday, but because it's about being out on the ocean in a boat.

And that is going to relate to our theme for today.

I want to do a language family show and I can't take you through every language family on Lexicon Valley, but some of them should be featured, especially if they are my favorite families.

We've talked a lot about Indo-European. I did you a Semitic show. That's technically a subfamily, but whatever.

Today I want to do Austronesian. Austronesian is one of my favorite groups and it really is worthy of a whole show because you can learn so much about language and linguistic just from Austronesian.

Austronesian is languages spoken starting in Southeast Asia. That includes the Philippines and Indonesia.

And then you move eastward and all those islands like Borneo and Sulawesi and Java and Timor and Bali. That's Austronesian land.

And then it kind of skippy skippy skips over New Guinea, the island of New Guinea. And on both edges north and south you've got some of these Austronesian languages.

You see like a person or maybe two people skipping along. Then you get way out into the south seas and Austronesian just keeps on going.

And that was the pathway of the people. And it finally ends way out on Easter Island and you go much further and you're in South America.

Austronesian is an enormous family much larger than say Indo-European. Austronesian is about a thousand languages.

So it's a big group and there's just so much there. You can learn so much about what it is to be a language with Austronesian.

But just the stretch and the spread of this group that languages so far apart from one another could be related is astonishing in itself.

So for example in Malay the word for I as in what you see out of is Mata. Okay well in itself that's not very interesting.

But then in Tagalog which always looks on the page like it's Tagalog but no it's Tagalog spoken in the Philippines. What's the word for I? Well it's Mata.

And then in New Guinea there's a language spoken along the coast that nobody's ever heard of beyond there called Motu.

And one thing about Motu is that the word for I is Mata. Then you go out into the south seas and so

and we're in Fiji and the word for I is well you can guess. And then you go a little further out you're in Samoa.

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