"The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history" -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: "The Poet".

Kia Ora!

Random Word: oi'piak ("woman/female" in East Masela)

Welcome to the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database.

This database contains 141,053 lexical items from 661 languages spoken throughout the Pacific region. Most of these languages belong to the Austronesian language family, which is the largest family in the world containing around 1,000 and 1,200 languages.

Each language in our database has around 210 words associated with it. These words correspond to basic items of vocabulary, such as simple verbs like 'to walk', or 'to fly', the names of body parts like hand or mouth, colors like red, numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) and kinship terms such as Mother, Father and Person. The full list is here.

We have a new paper out in Science: Language Phylogenies Reveal Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement.

More Information:

Warning: Please do not cite or publish anything using this database without the authors' permission.

We would welcome assistance from professional linguists to correct any mistakes, improve the cognacy judgments and to add further languages.

We only have between 55.1% and 66.1% of all of the Austronesian languages represented in this database, and would love to expand this number. If you have data for an Austronesian, Trans New Guinea / Papaun / Indo-Pacific or Australian language or dialect that are not here, please help us out.

To cite this database, please reference the following paper. You should also include the date that you obtained the data, as we are constantly improving and correcting the information contained here.

Greenhill, S.J., Blust. R, & Gray, R.D. (2008). The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database: From Bioinformatics to Lexomics. Evolutionary Bioinformatics, 4:271-283.

Latest News

Added Proto Central Pacific from Andrew Pawley. Thanks to Penny Gray Posted in austronesian on 2010-01-17 12:09:59 by (194)

Added Proto-Oceanic (Pawley) from Andrew Pawley. Thanks to Penny Gray Posted in austronesian on 2010-01-17 11:55:54 by (191)

Added Niuafo’ou from Dye (1980). Posted in austronesian on 2010-01-11 09:40:57 by (186)

Added Capisano from Jose Ricarte. Thanks to Jose Ricarte Posted in austronesian on 2010-01-11 09:17:59 by (185)

Added PPN RECONSTRUCTIONS FOR SWADESH 200 WORDLIST, MODIFIED FOR OCEANIC COMMUNITIES from A Pawley (9.8.09). Thanks to Penny Gray Posted in austronesian on 2009-12-29 14:56:44 by (183)

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