Austronesian
Americannoun
adjective
adjective
noun
Etymology
Origin of Austronesian
First recorded in 1900–05; Austronesi(a) + -an
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Only about 2.5% of the island’s population is of Austronesian descent, with ancestors preceding Japanese, Chinese and Dutch settlers in the early 1600s.
From Los Angeles Times • May 2, 2023
Such linguistic neutrality persists in a number of modern tongues whose third-person pronouns lack a masculine or feminine inflection, among them Armenian, Bengali, Farsi, Finnish, Hungarian, Yoruba and most Turkic and Austronesian languages.
From New York Times • Feb. 17, 2022
There were exceptions, however: some Austronesian languages paired the concept of love, a typically positive emotion, with pity, a typically negative one.
From Scientific American • Dec. 19, 2019
The people of Vanuatu today speak Austronesian languages like those presumably spoken by the Lapita.
From BBC • Mar. 2, 2018
Why did Austronesian people, stemming ultimately from mainland China, colonize Java and the rest of Indonesia and replace the original inhabitants there, instead of Indonesians colonizing China and replacing the Chinese?
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
