The Kra–Dai languages, are a language family in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeastern India. All languages in the family are tonal, including Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos, respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages; 60% of those speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan. There are also a number of speakers in continental Asia. They are spoken by about 386 million people. This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, and Tagalog (Filipino). According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages, which is the second most of any language family.
The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and East Timor by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan (non-Austronesian) speaking Melanesians as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages. It has controversially also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages.
The Philippine languages or Philippinic are a proposed group by R. David Paul Zorc (1986) and Robert Blust that include all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Indonesia—except Sama–Bajaw and a few languages of Palawan—and form a subfamily of Austronesian languages. Although the Philippines is near the center of Austronesian expansion from Formosa, there is little linguistic diversity among the approximately 150 Philippine languages, suggesting that earlier diversity has been erased by the spread of the ancestor of the modern Philippine languages.
Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass).
In linguistic typology, a verb–object–subject or verb–object–agent language, which is commonly abbreviated VOS or VOA, is one in which most sentences arrange their elements in that order. That would be the equivalent in English to "Drank cocktail Sam." The relatively rare default word order accounts for only 3% of the world's languages. It is the fourth-most common default word order among the world's languages out of the six. It is a more common default permutation than OVS and OSV but is significantly rarer than SOV, SVO, and VSO. Families in which all or many of their languages are VOS include the following:
Ray C. Dougherty is an American linguist and was a member of the Arts and Science faculty at New York University until 2014 (retired). He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College in the early 1960s and his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. At MIT, Dougherty was one of the first students of Noam Chomsky, working in the field of transformational grammar. During the Linguistics Wars of the 1970s, Dougherty was a critic of the generative semantics movement. Specializing in computational linguistics, Dougherty has published several books and articles on the subject.
Robert A. Blust was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Blust specialized in the Austronesian languages and made major contributions to the field of Austronesian linguistics.
The South Sulawesi languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian language family. They are primarily spoken in the Indonesian provinces of South Sulawesi and West Sulawesi, with a small outlying pocket in West Kalimantan.
Malagasy is an Austronesian language and the national language of Madagascar. Malagasy is the westernmost Malayo-Polynesian language, brought to Madagascar by the settlement of Austronesian peoples from the Sunda islands around the 5th century AD. The Malagasy language is one of the Barito languages and is most closely related to the Ma'anyan language, still spoken on Borneo to this day. Malagasy also includes numerous Malay loanwords, from the time of the early Austronesian settlement and trading between Madagascar and the Sunda Islands. After c. 1000 AD, Malagasy incorporated numerous Bantu and Arabic loanwords, brought over by traders and new settlers.
The Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) is a learned society that hosts forums for collaborative research on Austronesian languages. Founded in 1994 at the University of Toronto, AFLA is now administered from the University of Western Ontario. Conferences are held annually at a multitude of institutes across the globe, including Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Academia Sinica located in Taipei, Taiwan. The most recent 2019 conference was held in its home administration at the University of Western Ontario. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the AFLA 2020 conference was postponed and tentatively rescheduled for August 20 at the National University of Singapore.
Kei is an Austronesian language spoken in a small region of the Moluccas, a province of Indonesia.
Darrell T. Tryon was a New Zealand-born linguist, academic, and specialist in Austronesian languages. Specifically, Tryon specialised in the study of the languages of the Pacific Islands, particularly Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and the French-speaking Pacific.
Arrival is a 2016 American science fiction drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve and adapted by Eric Heisserer, who conceived the project as a spec script based on the 1998 short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. The film stars Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a linguist enlisted by the United States Army to discover how to communicate with extraterrestrials who have arrived on Earth before tensions lead to war. Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tzi Ma appear in supporting roles.
Shobhana Chelliah is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of Research and Advancement at the College of Information, University of North Texas. Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India. She was a Program Director for the US National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program from 2012-2015. She is currently partnering with individuals and academic institutions in India to create a state-of-the-art archive for the long term preservation and access of language documentation materials. This archive, the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages, is housed at the University of North Texas Digital Library. Chelliah’s 2022 Fulbright-Nehru fellowship is dedicated to development of these partnerships. Her publications include A Grammar of Meithei and The Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork as well as articles on Tibeto-Burman differential case marking and language contact, many of which she has co-authored with her students. She is working with Political Scientists James Meernik and Kimi King to create interdisciplinary frameworks to understand threats to language vitality. With health information expert Sara Champlain and phonologist Kelly Berkson, she is working to bring culturally-framed COVID information to underserved populations in the United States. With computational linguist, Alexis Palmer, she is working on discovering differential marking patterns through cross language comparison. These three projects are funded by the National Science Foundation.
Jessica Coon is a professor of linguistics at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in syntax and indigenous languages. She was the linguistics expert consultant for the 2016 film Arrival.
Hilda Judith Koopman is a linguist who does research and fieldwork in the areas of syntax and morphology. She is a professor in the department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the director of the SSWL database. The SSWL, which she together with Dennis Shasha inherited from Chris Collins at New York University NYU, is an open-ended database of syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties.
R. David Zorc is an American linguist primarily known for his work on Austronesian languages and linguistics, particularly the Philippine languages.
Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.