Malayo-Polynesian languages

The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages. They are widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. Malagasy is a geographic outlier, which is spoken on Madagascar. The Malayo-Polynesian (MP) languages are divided into two major subgroups, the Western MP and the Central-Eastern MP.

The Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word) to express the plural, and like other Austronesian languages have a low entropy; that is, the text is quite repetitive in terms of the frequency of sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number.

Western

Western Malayo-Polynesian has 300 million speakers and includes Bahasa Indonesia and Malay, Javanese, Malagasy, Tagalog, Ilocano and Cebuano, Buginese, as well as many others.

Eastern

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian has two subgroups: Polynesian and Micronesian. Micronesian includes the languages spoken by the native peoples of Micronesia such as Nauruan, Sama and Chamorro. Polynesian languages include Hawai'ian, Māori;, Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan and Tuvaluan. All of the said languages have official status in the countries and territories of the Pacific Ocean. Collectively they are spoken by about 1 million people.