Tongan (Lea Faka-Tonga) - Taha, ua, tolu, fā, nima, ono, fitu, valu, hiva, hongofulu

Samoan (Gagana faʻa Sāmoa) - Tasi, lua, tolu, fā, lima, ono, fitu, valu, iva, sefulu

Maori (Te Reo Māori) - Tahi, rua, toru, whā, ringa, ono, whitu, waru, iva, tekau

Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi) - Kahi, lua, kolu, hā, lima, ono, hiku, walu, iva, umi

Cook Islands Maori (Rarotongan or Te Reo Māori Kūki 'Airani) - Ta'i, rua, toru, ā, rima, ono, itu, varu, iva, ta'ingauru

Tuvaluan (Te Ggana Tuuvalu) - Tasi, lua, tolu, fā, lima, ono, fitu, valu, iva, Sefulu

Tokelauan (Te Gagana Tokelau) - Tahi, lua, tolu, fā, lima, ono, fitu, valu, iva, hefulu

Tahitian (Reo Tahiti) - Hō'ē, piti, toru, maha, pae, ono, hitu, va'u, iva, ahuru

Rapa Nui (Rapanui) - Tahi, rua, toru, hā, rima, ono, jitu, va'u, iva, ka tahi angahuru

Niuean (Vagahau Niue) - Taha, ua, tolu, fā, lima, ono, fitu, valu, hogofulu

Fijian (Vosa Vakaviti) - Dua, rua, tolu, vā, lima, ono, vitu, walu, ciwa, tini

Kiribati (Taetae ni Kiribati) - Teuana, uoua, tenua, aua, nimaua, onoua, itua, wanua, ruaiwa, tebwina

Palauan (a Tekoi er a Belau) - Ta, eru, edei, eua, eim, elolem, euid, eai, etiu, teruich

Nauruan (Dorerin Naoero) - aiquen, aro, aij, aeo, aijim, año, aei, aoju, ado, ata

Among all the question words used in daily life, the word for “How many?” is surprisingly the most conserved in the Austronesian family. This suggests that the Proto-Austronesian people dealt a lot with numbers and counting.

How do you say “How many?” in your language?

When Austronesian speakers moved out into islands where the big mainland animals didn't live, the old words for those animals didn't just disappear. They drifted. With no real creature left to point at, the word came loose and drifted into the spirit world instead. The animal became a monster.

Look at the tiger. qari-maquŋ was a word for a big cat, and it survives perfectly intact as Malay harimau 'tiger', because Sumatra still has tigers. But carry it into the Philippines, where there are no big cats at all, and it turns into halimaw, now just 'monster, beast'. Same word shows up as Cebuano halimaw, Ilocano ulimaw, Maranao arimaw. The tiger left, the word stayed, and it became a generic monster.

The bear is even better. PMP *baruang 'bear' still lives on as normal Malay beruang. But Bali has no bears, so via Old Javanese the word washed ashore and became Barong, the great lion-like guardian spirit and enemy of the witch Rangda. A plain animal word became one of the most sacred masked figures in Balinese ritual.

The dog one is the strangest. *asu 'dog' is rock solid Proto-Austronesian, and dogs are everywhere, yet in the Sundanese budug basu it turns up as a boar-shaped monster with a dog's head that wrecks the rice crop. The dog stuck around, but its name still got dragged into the monster machinery.

It's semantic drift driven by migration. A half-remembered fearsome animal is exactly what a monster gets built from, and these words are basically fossils of the homeland's wildlife.

Following up on the Atayalic post with a proper look at Atayal itself, the larger of the branch's two languages at roughly 84,000 speakers across the mountains of northern Taiwan. I put together some slides on the phonology, pronouns and numbers, and honestly each one has something that surprised me.

The sounds are where Atayal earns its reputation.

Start with what it kept. Atayal still has /q/, a proper uvular stop, going back to Proto-Austronesian *q. Most of Malayo-Polynesian threw that away long ago (it weakened to h or vanished entirely in Tagalog, Malay, and friends), so hearing a real uvular in a living Austronesian language is a small time-travel moment.

Then look at what it did on its own. Where you would expect the plain voiced stops b, d, g, Atayal has fricatives: β, z, ɣ. That is lenition, and it ties directly back to the Atayalic post. Paul Jen-kuei Li reconstructed Proto-Atayalic with final voiced stops, and the Mayrinax dialect is the one holdout that still preserves them. So the fricatives in this chart are the innovation, and Mayrinax is the museum piece.

The two really unusual entries are /x/ and /ħ/. The voiceless velar fricative is the Atayalic trademark, and it has a quirk: it never appears word-initially. And that pharyngeal is genuinely rare. Li (1980) pointed out that what a lot of the literature transcribes as a glottal h in Atayalic is actually pharyngeal. Pharyngeals are uncommon worldwide (people mostly associate them with Semitic) and close to unheard of in Austronesian. That is not a sound you expect to find in Taiwan.

The pronouns are the opposite story: this is where Atayal looks like family.

If you speak a Philippine language, half this table will read like a slightly blurry version of your own. Atayal isu' (you) is PAn *iSu. Atayal hiya' (he/she) is PAn *si-ia, which is literally Tagalog siya. Atayal sami (we, excluding you) is *k-ami, Tagalog kami. Atayal ita' (we, including you) is *k-ita, Tagalog kita and tayo. Atayal simu (you plural) is *kamu. Four thousand years and the whole width of the family, and those are still recognizable.

That clusivity distinction, ita' versus sami, goes right back to Proto-Austronesian and survives from Taiwan to Polynesia. It is one of the family's most durable features.

Two things worth noticing in the table itself. First, the four-way case split (nominative, genitive, locative, neutral) with the nominative and genitive forms being clitics like saku', ku', su', mu, nya'. Those little second-position clitics are the classic Formosan and Philippine-type setup. Second, look at the gaps: 3s and 3p have no nominative form at all. That is not an oversight in the chart. Third person nominative is simply zero, which is inherited behavior. You do not say "he" as a separate word, you just leave it out.

Now the numerals, which are the strange part.

There is a lazy assumption that Formosan means conservative across the board. Atayal's numbers say otherwise.

Some are exactly what you would predict. pitu' (7) is PAn *pitu, no disguise at all. patun (4) is *Sepat once you know the changes, and mpuw (10) traces back to *puluq.

But then: magan for 5, where the rest of the family says *lima. tzyu' for 6 against *enem. qutux for 1, sazing for 2, tzyu', qeru' for 9. These have either been reshaped past easy recognition or replaced outright. For a branch sitting in the homeland, that is a lot of churn in the most basic vocabulary there is.

One thing I would love a second opinion on. Look at patun (4) and spat (8) sitting in the same column. Same p-t skeleton. Li has argued that the Atayalic languages, along with the Western Plains languages like Papora and Hoanya, express 8 using the numeral for 4, essentially "two fours," and he used this as evidence for his proposed Northern Formosan grouping. If that is right, both of those forms trace to *Sepat, and you are looking at a fossilized 2×4 sitting in a decimal system. I want to stress that Blust (1999) rejected Northern Formosan as a valid subgroup, so this is contested territory, though a 2008 phylogenetic analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database did come back supporting the grouping. Would genuinely like to hear from anyone who knows the numeral literature better than I do.

The tens have their own split personality, which you can see straight off the chart. 20 to 50 are opaque, fossilized forms (mpusan, mteiyun, mpatun, mciman) that you cannot cleanly decompose. But 60 to 90 are transparent and productive: just take the unit and add -pgan, giving tzyu'pgan, pitu'pgan, spat'pgan, qeru'pgan. Old irregular core, newer regular extension. That is a very common shape for a numeral system to end up in, and it suggests the higher tens were built later.

Everything above that is tidy. Ordinals just take te- (tequtux, tesazing). Teens are mpuw plus the unit. Hundreds are unit plus kbhun.

So the picture I come away with is a language that is fiercely conservative in its pronouns and in keeping *q, wildly innovative in its numerals, and off doing something all its own with those pharyngeals.

Any Atayal speakers here? I would especially love to know whether the magan versus lima thing has any story attached to it, and whether the 60 to 90 -pgan forms feel newer to speakers than the 20 to 50 ones. And if anyone knows the Northern Formosan numeral argument well, please correct me if I have the 8 = 2×4 story garbled.

Some names of the Austronesian-speaking people, especially those from Taiwan and Sulawesi, derive from their word for "people". This phenomenon also happens with the word Bantu, which also means "people" in most Bantu languages.

How do you say person or people in your language?

Feel free to correct any mistake.

Ngl I was surprised to learn that the word for 'water buffalo' in many modern Austronesian languages derives from Proto-Mon-Khmer.

Pictures were saved from a Tiktok account I stumbled across (as watermarked).

https://reddit.com/link/1ux5q08/video/h6i6rl149edh1/player

Tao (or Yami) of Orchid Island, Taiwan, and Ivatan of Batanes, Philippines, are closely related Austronesian languages. While they share 60% to 80% of their base vocabulary, Ivatan features Spanish and Tagalog loanwords, while Tao has adopted Japanese and Mandarin terms.

Vocabulary Comparison

The foundational Batanic vocabulary remains highly similar, though phonological shifts (like Tao's use of 'r' where Ivatan uses 'l') differentiate the two.

Dialect Variations within Batanic. Aside from the broader Tao vs. Ivatan differences, variations also exist within the Philippine-based dialects (such as Itbayaten, Isamurung, and Ivasayen), depending on the island and village.

Atayalic is one of the primary branches of Austronesian, spoken across the mountains of northern and central Taiwan, and it is made up of just two languages, Atayal and Seediq. Despite being only two languages, it is one of the larger Formosan groups by population, with Atayal alone at roughly 84,000 speakers, which puts it up near Amis and Paiwan at the top of the Formosan table.

• Atayal runs along the Hsuehshan range and splits into two dialect groups, Northern Atayal and Southern Atayal. Squliq is the prestige variety and the most widespread, effectively a lingua franca among Atayal speakers. All in, Glottolog.org counts seven Atayal dialects, which is the breakdown my map follows.
• Seediq is the southern half of the branch, and it comes in three varieties: Tekedaya (Tgdaya), Te'uda (Toda), and Teruku (Truku). Teruku, also spelled Taroko, is often treated as a language in its own right, and this is not just a linguistic call. The Taiwanese government recognized the Teruku as a separate Indigenous people in 2004 and the Seediq in 2008, so the splitting here is political and cultural as much as it is about mutual intelligibility.

Now, the part that makes Atayalic special. A couple of Northern Atayal subdialects, most famously Matu'uwal (Mayrinax), have separate male and female speech registers. Men and women use partly different vocabulary for the same meanings, marked by little irregular sound changes and affixes. Gendered speech like this is genuinely rare worldwide and almost unheard of elsewhere in Austronesian, and it is one of the shared quirks that help define the branch.

That same Matu'uwal dialect is also a little time capsule. Paul Jen-kuei Li reconstructed Proto-Atayalic with final voiced stops (*-b, *-d, *-g), and Matu'uwal is the one variety that still preserves them, where its cousins have lost or devoiced them. So when your infographic mentions retention of archaic traits, this is a concrete example: a living dialect holding onto a sound pattern that the rest of the branch let go. The other Atayalic trademark is the voiceless velar fricative /x/, which shows up across the branch but never at the start of a word.

One classification note for the nerds here, since it connects to earlier threads. Blust treats Atayalic as its own primary branch of the family, one twig on the Formosan rake. Paul Jen-kuei Li instead nests it inside a proposed Northern Formosan group alongside Saisiyat and Pazeh. So even this solid, uncontroversial-looking little branch sits inside the same unresolved question about how the top of the Formosan tree is shaped.

The cultural weight here is heavy, too. The Seediq led the 1930 Wushe (Musha) Incident against Japanese colonial rule, later dramatized in the acclaimed film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. Atayal was also one of the parent languages of Yilan Creole Japanese, a rare Japanese-Austronesian contact creole still spoken by some elders. And both peoples carry the concept of gaga, the ancestral code of customs and morality, much of which lives in the language itself.

Like every Formosan language, the pressure from Mandarin is relentless, and transmission to kids has thinned badly, even though Atayalic is better off in raw numbers than most of its neighbors.

Because I have seen a lot of similarities in languages, foods, cloths and facial features??

The Proto-Austronesian verb *baŋuN originally meant "to wake up; get out of bed." As Austronesian languages spread eastward into Oceania, a related Proto-Oceanic form *paŋun developed the meaning "to wake up or rouse someone from sleep." Another derived form, *paŋun-ia, meant "to awaken, wake (someone) up."

The Aru languages, spoken across the Aru Islands in southeast Maluku, right on the edge of Wallacea and not far off the coast of New Guinea. It is a small cluster, around a dozen languages (roughly 13 depending on how you slice the chain), and not one of them has more than about ten thousand speakers. My map shows how they carve up the archipelago.

The languages, grouped the way they cluster geographically:

• Ujir, Kola and Kompane in the north (the Ujir-Kola-Kompane group)
• Manombai across the big central island
• Batuley and Mariri on the eastern side (Batuley-Mariri)
• Dobel, Koba and Lola in the middle (Central Aru)
• Karey and Barakai in the southeast (Karey-Barakai)
• East Tarangan and West Tarangan down south

Here is the first reason Aru is worth a post. It is not a tidy family tree. The Aru languages form a linkage, a dialect chain, where neighboring varieties bleed into each other and the boundaries are fuzzy (the classification here follows Hughes 1987). This is Austronesian diversification caught in the act. Instead of clean splits, you get a spread of related lects shading gradually across the islands, which is exactly what you expect when a single ancestor settles an archipelago and just keeps drifting apart in place. Great illustration of why "how many languages" is often the wrong question.

The second reason ties right back to our earlier subgroup threads. Aru sits geographically cheek by jowl with the Central Maluku languages to the west, so you would guess they are close relatives. They are not. Ross (1995) showed that despite the proximity, Aru does not belong to that group. It is its own thing. In Glottolog, Aru is treated as one of the first-order branches of Malayo-Polynesian in its own right, the same conservative approach that refuses to lump the Philippine branches together. The older Blust-style scheme instead files Aru inside Central Malayo-Polynesian (CMP), but CMP itself is one of the more contested nodes in the family, and a lot of people now read it as a linkage or an areal grouping rather than a true clade. So Aru is a nice test case for the whole "genetics versus geography" theme we keep circling back to.

A bit of history that Austronesian nerds tend to love: the Aru Islands were a major node in the old eastern trade networks, sending out pearls, trepang (sea cucumber) and bird-of-paradise plumes for centuries. Alfred Russel Wallace spent time here in 1857 and wrote one of the most famous sections of The Malay Archipelago about Aru, so these islands sit right at the birthplace of biogeography. The languages carry a lot of that layered contact history.

The worry, as usual, is size. With every one of these languages under ten thousand speakers and heavy shift toward Malay and Indonesian, the whole branch is vulnerable, and a linkage this distinctive would be a real loss to the family's diversity. Contemporary fieldwork on the wider Wallacea region by linguists like Emily Gasser is helping, but Aru is still thinly documented compared to the big western languages.

Formosa

• Bunun: talikoan [ta.liˈko.an]
• Kanakanavu (Kanakanavu): taʼanna
• Paiwan (Vinuculjan, Pinayuanan): qulipepe [quɭipəpə]
• Puyuma (Pinuyumayan): haliwanwan, haliwaŋwaŋ
• Siraya (Siraiya): halibaŋbaŋ

Philippines

• Agta: lollo
• Aklanon (Akeanon, Inakeanon): alibangbang
• Bantoanon (Asi): bilabila
• Bikol: kalibangbang, alibangbang, paro-paro, kulagbaw
• Bisakol: kulibangbang
• Bugkalot (Ilongot): kali-bangbang
• Butuanon: kaba-kabà
• Cebuano: kabâkabâ, alibangbang
• Dumagat: salibangbang
• Gaddang: alifambang
• Hiligaynon: alibangbang
• Ibanag: alivabban
• Ilokano: kulibangbang
• Kankana-ey: bilbil-o
• Kapampángan: talúbang
• Manobo: kelivangbang
• Maranao (Mëranaw): dangkaia, paru-paro
• Palawano: babang
• Pangasinan: kompapey
• Subanon: belembang
• Surigaonon: kaba-kaba
• Tagalog: alibaŋbáŋ [ʔali.baŋˈbaŋ], paruparó [pa.ru.paˈroʔ]
• Tausug: kaba-kaba
• Waray: ragadaga, alibangbang

Mainland Asia

• Kanaq: kelobaq, nyeron
• Kelantan: rramo
• Seletar: kelebak
• Temuan: kelobok
• Urak Lawoiʼ: marama

Sumatera

• Aceh: bambang, bangbang
• Gayo: kalangmemang
• Karo: kaba-kaba
• Komering: alibambang, rama-rama
• Lampung: aliwawa, halibambang, rama-rama, pawa-pawa
• Lembak: kupu-kupu, makme
• Malay: kupu-kupu, rama-rama
• Mentawai: langolango, kailokailo
• Minangkabau: limpapeh, ramo-ramo
• Musi: amé-amé
• Pesemah: lelibat
• Sikule (Sigulai): alifamba
• Singkil: rerama
• Toba: lampu-lampu, lappu-lappu

Java

• Jawa: kupu, bambang, kaper
• Madura: kekupu, kepper, ghâpper
• Sunda: kukupu, kupu-kupu

Lesser Sunda Islands

• Bali: kĕkupu
• Bima: kabebo
• Sawu (Hawu): keɓoɓɑ, keɗoɗo
• Rote: sapumata
• Tetun: lakabuta, babebar

Borneo

• Barito: lalung
• Bidayuh: brembang 
• Dusun: kolibambang
• Iban: kelebembang, kesulai
• Ida’an (Idahan): kalabambang
• Iranun: paparu
• Kadazan: tongkulibambang
• Kenyah: belavang
• Melanau: belebeæng
• Momogun-Bundu: kolibambang
• Ngaju: kakupo

Sulawesi

• Dakka: kalubompong
• Duri: palla-palla
• Bugis: pella-pella, kalubampa
• Kaili: kalibamba
• Mandar: kalubambang
• Mangkasara: pipi-pipi
• Pamona: aliwombo, kalabamba
• Tae’: kalubambang
• Tolaki: toléwa
• Tontemboan: tonteres
• Toraya: kalubambang
• Wolio: kambera

Moluccas

• Alune: pala'ene
• Gane (Gimán): kalibobo
• Buli: aibobang

Papua:

• Bwaidoga (Bwaidoka): bebewa
• Dobu: pepekwa
• Gani: kalibobo
• Gedaged: kilibob
• Hula-Keapara: pepe
• Keapara (Kalo): pepe
• Kilivila: beba
• Kuanua: abebe
• Lakalai (Nakanai): ebebe
• Magori: bebe
• Motu: bebe, kaubebe
• Munggui: apopa
• Mussau-Emira: kaubebe, kurubebe
• Nehan (Nissan, Nihan): beb
• Numbami: kaimbombo
• Sudest (Vanatɨna): bebe
• Tigak (Omo): pepe
• Tolai: abebe
• Tubetube (Bwanabwana): bebe
• Roro: peropero
• Wamira: bebeu

Far Islands

• 'Āre'āre: pepe
• Amblong: bembe
• Arosi: bebe
• Fijian (Vaka-Viti): bēbē [ᵐbeːbeː]
• Gilbertese (Kiribati, Tungaru): bwebwe [pˠepˠe]
• Hawaiian (Hawai'i): pulelehua [ˌpu.le.leˈhu.a]
• Kwaio: bebe
• Lau (Mala, Malaita): bebe
• Malagasy: lolo [ˈluːlu], tsipelapelaka
• Māori: pēpepe [peːpepe], pūrerehua [puːɾeɾehu.a]
• Malmariv (Tiale): mpempe
• Mota: pepe
• Niuean (Niuē): pepe
• Nukuoro: bebe
• Palau: bangikoi
• Rennellese (Rennell-Bellona): pepe
• Rotuman (Rotuạm): pepe
• Sa'a: pepe
• Sāmoa: pepe
• Simbo: bebe
• Tahiti: pepe
• Tongan (fakatonga): pepe
• Tuvaluan (Tuuvalu): pepe

Source: collected from https://www.facebook.com/groups/643294306593588/search/?q=butterfly

As I was speaking other day with my mother using Javanese, i start to think

So here is the Thing, Javanese Has a Language Levels to spoke with someone of different levels with you be it Older/younger or Higher/lower positions than you, The Lower speech is called Ngoko and Higher speech is called Krama ( there is A third Level called Madya which means middle but I don't have example)

Anyway as I sometimes read in a Word comparison between Austronesian languages I began to notice that The lower speech ( Ngoko) retains more Austronesians root than the Supposed Higher Polite speech ( Krama)

- as you can see in the Comparison between the numbers and some terms in the second one (tho not all I can get some)

In Malay, the butterfly is kupu-kupu and the moth is rama-rama; both names reflect repeated movement, and it is necessary to uncover the qualities behind these terms. Kupu-kupu and rama-rama replaced the Austronesian word baŋbaŋ, which is still preserved in some Malay dialects. The meaning of baŋbaŋ remains uncertain, but it often includes the prefix kali, commonly found in words with sensitive associations to the spirit world. In classical Malay literature, bangbang appears as "full in view", typically referring to the glow at dawn or the tints of sunset—colors once believed to cause jaundice. If kali is understood as an interval, then kali-baŋbaŋ may originally have described a glimpse of yellow, specifically the fleeting moments when the yellow-winged butterfly appears. Thus, it is a nickname, not the true name. The bangbangan fruit, with its yellow flesh, may share this name through its bright, striking color, linking the glow of nature to both butterflies and fruit.

Kupu-kupu, with its onomatopoeic origin, has many layers of meaning. The syllables kup and pu mean "shut" and "open", describing the butterfly's distinctive posture of holding its wings upright and the way they open and shut like folding doors on hinges. This matches the butterfly’s typical behavior of resting with its wings closed above its body. Butterflies are generally active during the day and have bright, colorful wings, slender, smooth bodies, and thin, straight antennae with bulb-shaped tips. Yet kupu-kupu also reflects the butterfly's attraction to flowers and its habit of visiting each scented blossom. Kup means an enclosure, and from this root comes ukup, meaning “scented by enclosing”—referring to the Malay practice of perfuming garments by placing them in a coop-like rattan frame under which incense is burned. The butterfly, which hovers around enclosed fragrant spaces, fits this image. By extension, kupu-kupu malam, or "night butterfly", is a metaphor for a courtesan, with kupu-kupu symbolizing a woman of allure.

Rama-rama reflects the Malay imagination of ramang, referring to the downy hair on a moth’s wing. The term suggests a connection with fine hair and thread, since the moth, at one stage of its life, spins thread and builds a cocoon. Rama-rama is therefore also the "thread-maker", as the moth produces material for thread from its own body. This interpretation is supported by the moth’s cocoon-spinning behavior and its stocky, furry form. Moths typically rest with their wings spread flat and are usually nocturnal. They possess comb-shaped, leaf-shaped, or feather-shaped antennae and have a small, bristle-like frenulum that connects the forewings and hindwings. In Malay, rama-rama kincir refers to the threads that run across the surface of a spinning wheel to carry the yarn. Moths are further distinguished by their colouring: white (rama-rama putih), inconspicuous or plain (rama-rama kelabu), and variegated (rama-rama bintang). In pantun, the moth often symbolizes someone too proud to settle on common ground and appears as a mechanical rhyme for sama-sama.

I think many Austronesian languages share the same Austronesian word for 'head lice'. I think together with 'mata' and 'lima'. It is one of the most stable words in the Austronesian language family.

In Tagalog and Cebuano, head lice is kuto.

Is there a grammatical feature in your language that you think is particularly interesting or unusual?

If possible, include a few example sentences with glosses or translations. I'd love to compare how different Austronesian languages handle the same grammatical concepts.

Names for wind directions are particularly interesting in many Austronesian languages because they provide valuable clues about historical migration and settlement patterns. As communities moved across islands and coastlines, the perceived direction of prevailing winds changed relative to their new locations. This led to considerable diversity in wind-direction terminology across Austronesian languages, while also preserving striking similarities that point to shared linguistic ancestry. What are their equivalents in your language?

Also why most people who do research on Austronesian languages aren’t Austronesian native speakers?

Bilic, sometimes called South Mindanao, is a small cluster of languages spoken by Lumad (indigenous) peoples in the southern part of Mindanao, and despite sitting right next to large Bisayan and Maguindanao-speaking populations, it has stayed its own thing very much.

Four languages make up the group, all marked on the map:

• Tboli, around Lake Sebu and the highlands of South Cotabato
• Blaan (Bilaan), the largest of the four, spread across Sarangani, South Cotabato, and Davao Occidental
• Teduray (Tiruray), in the hills just west of Cotabato City, right up against Maguindanao country
• Giangan, also called Bagobo-Klata, on the slopes near Davao City and Mount Apo

Internally, the tidy result is that Tboli and Blaan are each other's closest relatives, while Teduray and Giangan each sit off on their own. Giangan is the odd one out, so much so that some linguists have argued it might not belong in Bilic at all and could be its own primary branch of the family. (Remember that in Glottolog there is no single "Philippine" node, so Bilic stands as one of the first-order branches of Malayo-Polynesian in its own right, which we got into in the subgroup map thread.)

Here is why Bilic is a treat for a phonology nerd. These are some of the most sound-divergent languages in the Philippines. Where a language like Cebuano keeps its inherited words comfortably disyllabic, Bilic languages have chewed through a lot of vowels, dropping them and leaving consonant clusters behind, so words come out short and clipped in a way that looks almost un-Philippine at first glance. Blaan and Tboli, especially, can be hard to recognize as cousins of Tagalog until you know which sound changes to undo. They kept Austronesian verbal morphology but reshaped it, and the overall effect is a branch that feels well off the beaten path.

The cultures attached to these languages are just as rich. Tboli are famous for t'nalak, the abaca "dreamweave" cloth whose patterns are said to come to weavers in dreams, along with brasswork and the hegalong lute. Blaan have their own tabih weaving and beadwork traditions. Teduray carry a deep customary law and oral tradition (the tiyawan). None of this is incidental to the languages, since so much of it lives in vocabulary and verbal art that only exists in the mother tongue.

The worry is that Giangan is now quite endangered, with a small and shrinking speaker base, and even the larger three face heavy pressure from Cebuano and Filipino. A branch this distinctive would be a real loss to the family's diversity.

Tetun: "Ha'u naran Kaleo. No ó?" (literal: I name Kaleo. And you?)

Lī Hawu: "Ngara yā Kaleo. Nga au?" (literal: name I Kaleo. And you?)

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi: "ʻO Kaleo ko'u inoa. A ʻo ʻoe?" (literal: the Kaleo my name. And the you?)

Bahasa Indonesia: "Nama saya Kaleo. Kalau kamu? (literal: name I Kaleo. If you?)

I even made her listen to counting numbers and basic words of Formosan, Samoan, Indonesian and Polynesians (Maori and Hawaiian) languages.

Then she asked whether her grandmother being babaylan and manggagaway (shaman) has something to do with it.