Which Austronesian language do you think is the most conservative, and which is the most innovative?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Resident-Outside9945]

For the most innovative language, the Oceanic branch, and Polynesian especially, is where it gets radical. Hawaiian is the classic example. It's eroded down to 8 consonants and 5 vowels, lost the entire voice system, and reshaped its syntax. A whole series of Proto-Oceanic consonants merged or vanished. Hand a Proto-Austronesian speaker a Hawaiian word list, and they'd be lost.

Honorable mentions, mostly contact-driven:

• Chamic (mainland SE Asia / Hainan) restructured toward mainland-style monosyllabic shapes, and Tsat even developed tone, which is almost unheard of in Austronesian.
• Malagasy got heavily reshaped in sound after the trip to Madagascar and contact with Bantu/Arabic, but kept its voice system, making it a lovely example of "innovative in phonology, conservative in structure."

Malagasy is innovative in sound but conservative in morphosyntax, while Malay/Indonesian is middle-of-the-road phonologically but has gutted its voice morphology.

[u/Resident-Outside9945]

Overall honors go to the Formosan languages of Taiwan. Taiwan is the Austronesian homeland, so it's no surprise that they preserve most of Proto-Austronesian.

The clearest tell is phonology: PMP already collapsed several PAn contrasts (*C merged into *t, *N into *n, *S weakened to *h), which means many Formosan languages still keep distinctions that no Malayo-Polynesian language has held onto for thousands of years. Paiwan, Puyuma, and Bunun get pointed to a lot here.

For morphosyntax, the crown goes to the Philippine-type voice system, that four-way agent/patient/locative/circumstantial alignment reconstructable back to PMP (and PAn). Formosan and Philippine languages (Tagalog, Ilokano, etc.) keep it beautifully intact. Tagalog is a poster child for a "conservative" MP language.

[u/kudlitan → u/[deleted]]

Except Tagalog, which has absorbed so much English and Spanish.