A Year in Language, Day 129: Proto-Austronesian Proto-Austronesian, or PAN, is the reconstructed ancestral language of all Austronesian languages which are now spoken by 5% of the worlds population in Oceania, Maritime Southeast Asia, and Madagascar. Research into reconstruction is fairly recent, so linguists understanding of what this language would have been like is still evolving. PAN was spoken some 6-8,000 years ago in what is now Taiwan. Evidence to this origin is the fact that the vast majority of diversity in the language family is found within the Formosan languages native to island. To give perspective, imagine if the Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic languages were all spoken solely in the British Isles, and only Greek and its descendants ever made it to and populated mainland Europe. Phonetically PAN likely had a moderate sized inventory which is noteworthy because so many of its descendants are known for their incredibly small ones. Possibly due to the population funneling effects of voyaging the phonetic history of the Austronesian languages is one of constant merging. PAN also likely made intense use of reduplication, and had grammatical processes that could target many different parts of a syllable/word as the locus for reduplication, i.e. the whole root, just the initial consonant, just the initial syllable, just the rhyme of the final syllable, etc. The aptly names Austronesian alignment system of ascribing grammatical roles, whose unique properties I have mentioned several times in posts on Philippine languages and will spare you the diatribe here, also was already in effect during the age of PAN.