Austronesian

Before 1500 no family covered more of the earth's surface than Austronesian. It reaches from Madagascar off the coast of Africa to Easter Island in the eastern Pacific, and from Taiwan to New Zealand, which is more than half the circumference of the planet. The standard account places its origin in Taiwan, because the deepest divisions in the family are all among the indigenous Formosan languages and everything outside the island, some twelve hundred languages, descends from one branch of them.

From Taiwan the expansion moved into the Philippines, then Indonesia and the western Pacific, and finally out into the open ocean. The last stages were extraordinary feats of navigation: Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand were reached by deliberate voyaging against prevailing winds, in double-hulled canoes, by people navigating with stars, swells and birds.

Madagascar was settled from Borneo, across the Indian Ocean, which is why the language of a large African island is most closely related to a language of Southeast Asia. The family is a standing demonstration that language, archaeology and genetics can be made to tell one story, and that the story can be surprising. It also holds two of the most widely spoken languages of Southeast Asia, Malay in its Indonesian and Malaysian standards and Javanese, so the family is at once the vehicle of some of the smallest speech communities on earth and of a national language used by hundreds of millions.

Two words that anthropology took from this family have had careers far outside it. Mana, a term for potency or efficacy attaching to persons, objects and places, entered European scholarship through Pacific ethnography in the nineteenth century and became a general theoretical concept, in ways that practitioners in the Pacific have not always recognised.

Tapu, meaning set apart and restricted, entered English as taboo by way of Cook's voyages and has had a similar afterlife. Both descend within Austronesian and are cognate across enormous distances, which is the evidence that a related religious vocabulary travelled with the voyages rather than developing separately in each island group. Around them sit related terms for the ancestors, for genealogical descent and for the enclosure or marked ground where ritual is performed. The atlas notes two things about this. The first is that the reconstruction is real: these are inherited words with regular correspondences, not loose resemblances. The second is that the concepts they name belong to living traditions with their own custodians, and that the scholarly career of mana as a comparative term is a separate matter from what the word means to the communities that use it, which is a distinction the earlier literature very often failed to make.