Subgrouping

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Subgrouping in linguistics is the division of a language family into its constituent branches. In standard linguistic theory, subgroupings are determined based on shared innovations between languages. [1]

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The Greater Central Philippine languages are a proposed subgroup of the Austronesian language family. They are spoken in the central and southern parts of the Philippines, and in northern Sulawesi. This subgroup was first proposed by Robert Blust (1991) based on lexical and phonological evidence, and is accepted by most specialists in the field.

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The Central Loloish languages, also known as Central Ngwi, is a branch of Loloish languages in Bradley (1997). It is not used in Lama's (2012) classification. Central Loloish is also not supported in Satterthwaite-Phillips' (2011) computational phylogenetic analysis of the Lolo-Burmese languages.

The Flores–Lembata languages are a group of related Austronesian languages spoken in the Lesser Sundas, on eastern Flores and small islands immediately east of Flores. They are suspected of having a non-Austronesian substratum, for example in Sika, but not to any greater extent than the Central Malayo-Polynesian languages in general.

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The Proto-Philippine language is a reconstructed ancestral proto-language of the Philippine languages, a proposed subgroup of the Austronesian languages which includes all languages within the Philippines as well as those within the northern portions of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Proto-Philippine is not directly attested to in any written work, but linguistic reconstruction by the comparative method has found regular similarities among languages that cannot be explained by coincidence or word-borrowing.

The Malakula languages are a group of Central Vanuatu languages spoken on Malakula Island in central Vanuatu. Unlike some earlier classifications, Lynch (2016) considers the Malakula languages to form a coherent group.

References

  1. Krishnamurti, Bh.; Moses, Lincoln; Danforth, Douglas G. (1983). "Unchanged Cognates as a Criterion in Linguistic Subgrouping". Language. 59 (3): 541–568. doi:10.2307/413903. ISSN   0097-8507.

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1957. "The problem of linguistic subgroupings", in Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.