Talk:Austronesian peoples

needs work

Hey y'all, Your intro section leaves out Taiwan, which is not in Oceania or SE Asia.. it's in NE Asia.. and I'm not so sure the Filipinos are Formosan. I'll check. Later --Ling.Nut 01:42, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Info from the 1911 Encyc. Brit.? OK, now I see the prob. This article is new... and it needs more than a little work. Everything needs to be cited; I have doubts about many of the facts as presented. Are we sure that the subcategories given are valid & reflect a consensus among scholars? Are we sure we have other facts straight? I'll try to help, whenever I can. Cheers! --Ling.Nut 02:00, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Taiwan isn't NE Asia at all. It is the absolute southernmost area considered to be E Asia and not SE Asia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.19.126.5 (talk • contribs)

I added more stuff, but I'm sorry if its too rough at the moment. I'll probably gather alot of info from the other sections of existing articles related ot the austronesian people(the Malay, South east asians, the pacific islanders, hawaiians, polynesians, etc). I'll probably go ahead and borrow some pics from those articles as well. I need sleep at the moment so anybody is welcome to do this to-do list --Chicbicyclist 03:17, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

follow the WikiProject Ethnic Groups template

When making new sections, I'd like to follow the template here, albeit disincluding some sections. For example, I would be very hesitant about putting an "appearance" section.(In fact, I removed that section). --Ling.Nut 12:19, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps changing the name of that section from "Appearance" to "Characteristic Features" in line with the caucasian page. I was actually trying to figure out a better name last night and figured somebody would come along and change it. I still feel it should be included because the austronesians are factually distcintive looking compared to the east asians, causcasians and the africans. I would assume a workable npov entry about it would work. --Chicbicyclist 02:45, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Filipinos: Formosan as opposed to Malay

User Matthewprc recently edited the Geographic Distribution section and grouped the /filipinos with the Formosan group from the Malays. Any references or sources for this? --Chicbicyclist 09:06, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi! The Capelli, et.al. journal (link) specifically answers your question. The haplotypes for Filipino and Taiwanese aboriginal participants were analyzed, and have been found to be similar. In fact, the haplotype of the Filipinos are even closer to that of the Taiwanese aborigines than to that of other Austronesians (such as those in Borneo and in Indonesia). And to further it, Filipinos actually have facial features closer to the Taiwanese aborigines than to the Malays of Malaysia and Indonesia. -- User:Matthewprc 05:54, 26 September 2006 (UTC+8)

I guess the definition on Malay does not depend on the genetic characteristics of the population but on the cultural characteristics. The Philippiines is Malay because like Malaysia and Indonesia, it has been heavily influenced by Indian, Chinese and Islamic cultures. Besides, a substanstial number of Filipinos have genes from non-Asian ethnic groups but that doesn't make them less Filipino. Also, the languages of the Philippines all belong to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, which may have different cultural characteristics to all Formosan ethnic groups excluding the Tao people. 23prootie 17:54, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I also would like to point out that the sample sizes were quite small(I'm not sure if thats significant in the genetic sense), and did not say what part of the Philippines the sample population came from. It's possible that they tested those in northern Luzon, which arguably had less contact with those from the rest of Southeast Asia. Many legends in the Central Philippine islands, while not to be taken without appropriate amounts of grains of salt, speak of waves migration from neighboring Borneo, a few hundreds of years up to over a thousand after the original Austronesians leapfrogged from Taiwan, northern Philippines and the rest of SEA.--Chicbicyclist 20:16, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Would Matthewprc please fix that link so that I may actually view the article by Capelli et al. in which it is claimed that genetic evidence supports the hypothesis of a closer genetic relationship between Filipinos and Taiwanese aborigines than between Filipinos and other Malayo-Polynesian-speaking peoples? This is very interesting news to me, because I have found in the results of many surveys of human Y-chromosome diversity that the Taiwanese aborigines and many Filipino populations display the mutation that defines Y-chromosome Haplogroup O1a at an unusually high frequency. Populations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Polynesia display very different distributions of Y-chromosome diversity. West-Central Indonesians and Malaysians tend to display a rather high frequency of Haplogroup O2a Y-chromosomes, which are otherwise typical of Austro-Asiatic-speaking peoples of continental Southeast Asia and South Asia. East Indonesians and Polynesians, on the other hand, are very clearly peoples of mixed ancestry resulting from the hybridization of Malayo-Polynesian-speaking invaders and autochthonous Papua-Melanesian peoples. Micronesians are a very mixed bag, apparently reflecting influences from both post-hybridization, Oceanic-speaking proto-Polynesians and from some population closely related to modern Filipinos. One fact that I think is very important to point out to people is that the "unusual" features of East Indonesians and Polynesians are not characteristic of the original proto-Austronesians, who appear to have been a rather typical East Asian race bearing a close resemblance to peoples of China; the non-Mongoloid features of East Indonesians and Polynesians are simply the result of their ancestors' having intermarried with Melanesoid-Australoid populations in antiquity and with European colonists in more recent times. Ebizur 23:34, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Population estimate

Thanks 23pootie. 380,000,000 sounds more plausible than either 350,000,000 or 400,000,000.--Chicbicyclist 00:03, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, welcome.:) 23prootie 00:23, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

...the aforementioned statement, and the untrustworthy negotiation of crucial figures in the background, thus proving the academia right: never trust wikipedia. cheers!

culture section

I doubt that headhunting or cannibalism are common in either Southeast Asia or Oceania, though these practices have been reported. The article should emphasize the past nature of the practices mentioned and/or cite references for a recent event. Makerowner 04:50, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Origins

I was reading about the demographics of the various countries listed and mentioned in this article and many of them still says the predominant(old and wrong?) version that states that their people came from Mainland southeast Asia, or that they originated from present day Malaysia. They contradict what is being said in this article, basically.

I would edit them to at least mention a competing theory but I don't want an edit war to ensue so I'll probably wait for an expert to touch this article and add more references. Speaking of references, how sure are we about the origins of the Austronesian people as south China-Taiwan-Philippines-the rest of Southeast Asia as opposed to Mainland Asia-Malay archipelago-Malay archipelago? We probably need better citations but what is the credibility of the current ones?--Chicbicyclist 06:42, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Use of the term ‘Malay’

There’s a discussion going on regarding the use of the term ‘Malay’ here. Perhaps the editors of this article would be interested in taking part. —Lagalag 16:16, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Austronesian Hinduism in Fiji?

I think your note on Hinduism being practised by Austronesians in Fiji is rather incorrect. Hinduism is mainly practised by the large Indian community in Fiji rather than the indigenous Austronesian population. Please correct this accordingly. FRM SYD 04:03, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Populations Wrong

i notice the population of Austronesians were marked as the actual estimated countries populations. For example in Malaysia the population of Austronesians would only be around 16-18 million, as there are many Chinese Malaysians and Indian Malaysians. Philippines is the same but to a much lesser extent, they also have many Chinese Filipinos, and Indonesia aswel. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jandela (talk • contribs).

I agree. I'm about to add New Zealand to the list, using the total census population for the following groups: Maori, Pacific Peoples, Filipino, Indonesian, and Malay. I'll excluded groups such as Malaysian Chinese (because they're clearly out of scope), and also Vietnamese and Cambodian (because I'm not sure how many of them should count). I'll correct the Fijian number too. -- Avenue 10:30, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

New zealand should be added, but only if it says the maoris specificly Australian Jezza 03:23, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there's room in the infobox to split out all the different groups. We could split the NZ total into Maori (565,000) and Other (290,000) if you like. This has reminded me about the original post. I'll try to fix the Malaysia problem now. -- Avenue 04:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

The intro says: The Austronesian people are a population group in Oceania and Southeast Asia who speak or had ancestors who spoke one of the Austronesian languages.

Well it is not only a matter of ancestry. As for Indonesia, most Indonesian-Chinese do speak an Austronesian language. In fact colloquial Indonesian-Malay is based on Sino-Malay. This applies also to Malaysia but albeitly only to the younger generations as there are many older Chinese who doesn't speak Malay. Meursault2004 06:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

but what i mean is that is you just put New Zealand down, that could mean the europeans, the indians, the chinese, it should say New Zealand- Maori, i don't think for the philippines there should be because the majority is austronesian if you understand what i mean haha Australian Jezza 08:07, 17 April 2007 (UTC)