Editing Austronesian languages (section)

==Lexicon==
{{main|Proto-Austronesian language#Vocabulary}}
The Austronesian language family has been established by the linguistic comparative method on the basis of [[cognate|cognate sets]], sets of words from multiple languages, which are similar in sound and meaning which can be shown to be descended from the same ancestral word in [[Proto-Austronesian language|Proto-Austronesian]] according to regular rules. Some cognate sets are very stable. The word for ''eye'' in many Austronesian languages is ''mata'' (from the most northerly Austronesian languages, [[Formosan languages]] such as [[Bunun language|Bunun]] and [[Amis language|Amis]] all the way south to [[Māori language|Māori]]).{{sfn|Greenhill|Blust|Gray|2003–2019}}

Other words are harder to reconstruct. The word for ''two'' is also stable, in that it appears over the entire range of the Austronesian family, but the forms (e.g. [[Bunun language|Bunun]] ''dusa''; [[Amis language|Amis]] ''tusa''; [[Māori language|Māori]] ''rua'') require some linguistic expertise to recognise. The [[Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database]] gives word lists (coded for cognateness) for approximately 1000 Austronesian languages.{{sfn|Greenhill|Blust|Gray|2003–2019}}