We humans are defined and fascinatedby our languages. Especially intrigu-ing are the 1,200 or so languages of

the Austronesian language family, possiblythe largest family among the 6,000 languagesof the modern world1. Until the Europeancolonial expansion spread Indo-Europeanlanguages far and wide after AD 1492, Aus-tronesian was the most widely distributedfamily, spoken across a realm spanning26,000 km from Madagascar in the west toEaster Island in the east (Fig. 1).

Austronesian history has been difficult to reconstruct, however, because there are no preserved samples of writing in any Aus-tronesian language until about AD 670, bywhich time the family’s expansion was nearlycomplete. A reanalysis of Austronesian languages by Robert Blust2 strengthens theidentification of the first Austronesian way-station, illuminates archaeological findingsand the history of boatbuilding, and mayhelp reinterpret the histories of other lan-guage families.

Blust’s analysis yields an astonishing pat-tern. Those 1,200 Austronesian languagesfall into ten subgroups, of which nine (con-taining only 26 languages) are spoken onlyby the non-Chinese aborigines of the islandof Taiwan. The tenth subgroup encompassesall Austronesian languages outside Taiwan,from Madagascar to east Polynesia — all1,174 of them. It is as if the Indo-Europeanlanguage family consisted of 1,174 closelyrelated Slavic languages, spoken fromBritain to Sri Lanka, with all nine other Indo-European language groups — Germanic,Celtic, Hittite, Italic and the rest of them —being confined to Ireland. Previous studieshad recognized several distinctive Austro-nesian language groups on Taiwan, but it had not been appreciated that the numberwas so high.

How do language families differentiate?With time, languages change, and dialectsthat at first are mutually intelligible graduallybecome more and more distinct. So it seemsthat the early diversification of existing Austronesian languages must have takenplace long ago, on Taiwan. Eventually, justone group of Taiwanese emigrated to otherislands, and their descendants in turn emigrated to still other islands, to becomeancestral to all living Austronesian peoplesoutside Taiwan.

This linguistic evidence for the Austro-

nesian expansion correlates well with archae-ological evidence. Studies of pots, tools andbones have shown that all farming in thePacific outside New Guinea stems from thecolonization of Taiwan by south Chinesefarmers by around 4300 BC, followed by theirexpansion through the Philippines andIndonesia to Polynesia, the Malay peninsulaand Madagascar1,3. Of course, pots do nottalk, and it can be impossible to guess the languages spoken by the pot-makers. But inthe Pacific, identifying the potmakers is easy,because all Polynesian islands were uninhab-ited until the arrival of people making so-called Lapita pots began at around 1200 BC,and there is no archaeological evidence forarrivals of other peoples after them4. Becauseall traditional languages throughout Polyne-sia are Austronesian, those first potters musthave spoken Austronesian languages.

Especially for those of us interested inboats, the details of Austronesian languagesprove as instructive as this main pattern. Thecontrast between big differences among Tai-wanese languages and much more modestdifferences among extra-Taiwanese lan-guages suggests that there was a ‘long pause’between the Austronesian colonization ofTaiwan and the Austronesian expansion outof Taiwan. But there is also another contrast,within those extra-Taiwanese languagesthemselves, between non-Polynesian lan-guages and a discrete sub-subgroup consist-ing of the closely related Polynesian lan-guages. This suggests that there was a further

long pause, between the first colonization of a bridgehead in Polynesia and the sub-sequent expansion throughout Polynesia.

Both of these linguistically deduced longpauses are confirmed by archaeological evi-dence. From this it seems that there was a1,000-year gap (from about 4300 to 3300 BC)between farmers’ colonization of Taiwanand their subsequent colonization of thePhilippines, and a further 1,000-year gap(from about 1200 to 200 BC) between theLapita colonization of west Polynesia and thecolonization of east Polynesia1–4.

Blust suggests that these two long pauseswere due to the time required to develop two leaps in boat technology. Crossing the375-km seas separating Taiwan from thePhilippines would have required much bet-ter boats than crossing the mere 140-kmstrait between mainland China and Taiwan.The ship-building revolution that broughtthe Philippines and Indonesia within reachmay have involved the invention of outriggercanoes. Blust identifies many words in extra-Taiwanese Austronesian languages, but nonein the Taiwanese languages, for the compo-nent parts of these canoes — which, in his-torical times, were widespread among Aus-tronesian peoples except for the Taiwanese,who only had bamboo sailing rafts. Simi-larly, the second ship-building revolutionessential to mastery of the open oceans separating the islands of east Polynesia mayhave been the invention of the Polynesiandouble-hulled platform sailing canoe, rated

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Taiwan’s gift to the worldJared M. Diamond

Figure 1 The geographical span of Austronesian languages. This language family encompasses alllanguages spoken on all Pacific islands from Sumatra in the west to Easter Island in the east, except forthe Papuan languages of New Guinea and a few adjacent islands. They are also spoken in Madagascarand in mainland Malaysia. From the work2 discussed here, it turns out that of the ten subgroups ofAustronesian languages, nine are confined to Taiwan (red circle), and that all Austronesian languagesoutside Taiwan belong to the tenth subgroup (green), which includes Polynesian languages (darkgreen; only a few of the hundreds of Polynesian islands are shown here). (Redrawn from ref. 1.)

Study of the giant Austronesian language family tells us a great deal aboutthe history of Pacific peoples and boatbuilding, as well as about AboriginalAustralia.

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by eighteenth-century European seafarers assuperior to contemporary European ocean-going ships.

Blust’s study may help us to understandanother issue in historical linguistics. The260 or so Aboriginal Australian languagesare usually considered to belong to a singlelanguage family5. That is surprising, for tworeasons. First, people have been living inAustralia for at least 50,000 years, ample timefor repeated differentiation of language fam-ilies; and Aboriginal Australian history hasbeen without the homogenizing populationmovements analogous to the spread of Chi-nese farmers, whereby one language familycould replace all others. Second, Australianlanguages are similar in their sounds butdiverse in their vocabularies, leading lin-guists to consider them related but to try toexplain away their divergent vocabularies.

Blust’s work on Taiwanese Austronesianlanguages suggests that Aboriginal Aus-tralia’s divergent vocabularies should betaken seriously and attempts made to explainaway their convergence in sounds. The diver-sity in Taiwanese languages was formerlyoverlooked for several reasons, includingtheir similar sound inventories, for instancethe lack of so-called palatal consonants (suchas ‘z’, ‘j’, ‘ch’ and ‘sh’ in English). But Blustpoints to other cases in which similar soundsystems have spread over geographicallyadjacent language families whose distinct-ness on other grounds is beyond question.Examples are the sharing of click consonantsby South Africa’s Zulu and Khoisan lan-guages; the sharing of retroflex consonants(pronounced with the tip of the tonguecurled back) among the four otherwise verydifferent language families of the Indian sub-continent; and the shared absence of nasalconsonants in languages of North America’sPacific northwest.

This sharing of sounds is expected todevelop in an area (such as Aboriginal Aus-tralia) where each language is confined to asmall tribelet, and where all children grow up multilingual so they can understand andmarry members of neighbouring tribelets6.For instance, a few months ago, while I wassitting around a campfire in New Guineawith a dozen New Guinea highlanders, eachof us volunteered how many languages hespoke. It turned out that every one of theNew Guineans spoke between five and ten.Today, I and most other native English-speakers who speak French mangle it with anatrocious accent, and the same is true of mostnative French-speakers attempting English.

Suppose, however, that an English tribe-let and a French tribelet, thrown togetherwith 258 others in an area the size of Aus-tralia, were forced to seek marriage partnersin other tribelets, and were left in isolationfor 50,000 years. At the end of that era, theremight still be 260 languages with distinctvocabularies and grammars, but French and

English might now be so similar in theirsounds that my wife would no longer blush at my fractured French. The multilingualismof Aboriginal Taiwanese and Australiansrepresented the norm for almost all ofhuman history; we Nature readers who growup in big monolingual nations are an aberration of modern times. ■

Jared M. Diamond is in the Department ofPhysiology, University of California Medical School,Los Angeles, California 90095-1751, USA.

e-mail: jdiamond@mednet.ucla.edu1. Bellwood, P., Fox, J. J. & Tryon, D. The Austronesians: Historical

and Comparative Perspectives (Australian National University,Canberra, 1995).

2. Blust, R. Symp. Ser. Inst. Linguist. Acad. Sinica 1, 31–94 (1999).

3. Bellwood, P. Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago(Academic, North Ryde, Australia, 1985).

4. Kirch, P. V. The Lapita Peoples (Blackwell, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1997).

5. Ruhlen, M. A Guide to the World’s Languages, Vol. 1 (StanfordUniv. Press, 1987).

6. Dixon, R. M. W. The Rise and Fall of Languages (CambridgeUniv. Press, 1997).

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710 NATURE | VOL 403 | 17 FEBRUARY 2000 | www.nature.com

Organic semiconductors that can emitlight have developed rapidly over thepast decade1,2. These materials offer

the prospect of flat, and even flexible, dis-plays that operate at low voltage and emitlight, giving excellent contrast and viewingangle. The displays use light-emitting diodes(LEDs) made up of thin layers of organicmaterials sandwiched between suitable con-tacts (Fig. 1a). When a voltage is applied tothe contacts, charges are injected into thedevice. Opposite charges can meet up andcombine to form an excited state known as

an exciton, of which usually only 25% can goon to emit a photon3.

On page 750 of this issue, Baldo et al.4

report an ingenious way of getting light emis-sion from the other 75%, thereby potentiallyimproving the efficiency of organic LEDs.This will greatly help to reduce power con-sumption (which is especially important forportable devices), increase operating life-time, and increase light output.

Light emission in organic materials com-monly occurs when the material absorbsenergy and becomes excited, then rapidly

Display technology

Sidestepping the selection rulesI. D. W. Samuel and A. Beeby

Figure 1 A fourfold increase in the efficiency of an organic light-emitting device. a, A conventionalorganic light-emitting diode consists of a number of organic layers in between suitable contacts.Opposite charges are injected from each contact and pass through the organic layers and combine toform an exciton in either a ‘singlet’ or ‘triplet’ spin configuration. Only the singlet excitons emit light,with the triplets decaying to heat and being wasted. Positive charges move through the hole transportlayer (HTL), and negative charges move through the electron transport layer (ETL) to reach theemissive layer where the excitons form. b, In Baldo and colleagues’ device4, the emissive layer consistsof a set of alternating layers, which contain either a phosphorescent material or a fluorescent dyeembedded in a host organic material. The result is that both singlet and triplet excitons aretransferred from the host material to the phosphorescent sensitizer and on to the fluorescent dye,which then emits light. This avoids the triplet excitons being wasted, greatly increasing the efficiencyof light emission. (ITO is a transparent contact, indium tin oxide.)

MetalETLEmissive layerHTLITOGlass

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