Hello. Some linguists have classified Southeast Asian into several families Australoasian, Austronesian, Mon-Khmer etc. , but I agree with those who claim that nearly all of them can be lumped together into a large superfamily which they call "Malayo-Polynesian". Some linguists and anthropologists place the earliest origins of this group in South China, some in Thailand, some in India, one researcher even as far west as what is now Turkey. More research needs to be done here. Almost all agree, however, that the ancestral speakers of this group were a farming people.

Just a casual reading about various Southeast Asian languages turns up random similarities from language to language that leads to a network of similarities,  nevertheless, ponting to a common ancestor. The Malayo-Polynesian group is not unlike the Indo-European group which also spans half the globe. It stretches from Thailand to New Zealand and from Madagascar to Hawaii and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Keep in mind, also, that we are talking about languages whose common ancestor was probably spoken at least 5,000 years ago.

Here are some of the similarities:

1) Fish - Malayan & Indonesian ikan, Vietnamese cá.
2) River - Malayan & Indonesian sungai; Viet. sông
3) Tree - Vietnamese cây, Ilokano kay
4) Star - Ilokano bituen, Tagalog bituin, Samoan fetu
5) Night - Ilokano rabii , Tagalog gabi
6) Light - Vietnamese nhe, Ilokano nalag-an,
               Tagalog magaan, Samoan mama

7) Eye - Vietnamese con mat, Ilokano & Tagalog mata
             Samoan mat
8) Ear - Vietnamese tai, Tagalog tainga, Samoan taliga
9) Fat - Vietnamese mâp, Tagalog mataba
10) New - Vietnamese mo’i, Thai mai, Laotian maii,
11) Old Person - Vietnamese gia, Thai gaa
12) Heart -Vietnamese qua tim, Thai & Laotian huajai
13) Onion - Vietnamese hánh, Thai hua hawm
14) To wash - Vietnamese r’u'a, Thai & Laotian lahng
                       Cambodian liang
15) To see - Vietnamese nhin, Thai & Laotian hen
                    Cambodian keun.

Finally, I also leave you with someone else’s opinion on the whole subject:

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0846052.html

These kinds of vocabulary similarities can be found between a large number of languages that have long been in contact, but it is not enough to prove they are a single linguistic family.
The name of the horse in Chinese (ma) and Thai (maa) has an Indo-European origin (cf. English mare). This is of course not enough to group everything in a single family.
There are distinct linguisitic groups in SE Asia and no sufficient proof to unite them:
*Austroasiatic (The unity of this group is not certain)
    - Mon-Khmer (Khmer, Vietnamese)
    - Munda
    - Asli
*Tai-Kadai (Thai, Lao, Zhuang…)
*Miao-Yao
*Austronesian
    - Formosan
    - Malayo-Polynesian (Indonesian, Tagalog, Maori…)
*Sino-Tibetan (Burmese)

Bertrand,

Thanks for your reply.

I wish to emphasize, however,  that I am not talking about a linguistic "family" here but rather a linguistic "superfamily" much like the proposed Nostratic superfamily which you may have heard about which includes Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, Kartvelian (Georgian, Swan, Laz etc.) and Hamito-Semitic. Another superfamily is the proposed "Dene-Caucasian" which includes languages as far afield as Basque, Etruscan, Sumerian, North Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan and some North American Indian languages, especially Athabaskan.

Word borrwings between languages do indeed happen all around the world. However, It’s hard to tell for certain if "ma" is an Indo-European borrowing into Chinese. Some linguists like Merritt Ruhlen and Aaron Dolgopolsky would argue that the word goes back to a very early  prehistoric time when Dene-Caucasian and Nostratic were one language. The horse is certainly an animal common to the steppelands and pastures of all of Eurasia. Also, linguists claim that the "comparitive method" which they use in comparing word relationships among languages enables them to actually screen out words that are borrowings or coincidences from words that are indigenous.

If you have any further questions are comments, by all means, feel free to reply.

—- Brian

On the whole, I agree with Bertrand, but I’m very skeptical regarding the horse.

The list in the OP proves absolutely nothing. In the first place, there are so many borrowings and mutual influences between the SE Asian languages that it is impossible to work out relationships from cherry-picked words. In the second place, Chinese and Vietnamese one-syllable words need to be treated with extra caution because it is so easy to believe in similarities when you only compare a few sounds and not longer strings.

From the list:

Vietnamese nhe, Ilokano nalag-an, Tagalog magaan, Samoan mama

No sound in the Vietnamese word occurs in any of the other languages, and I don’t find the three others very similar either.

To use word similarities as circumstantial evidence for a relationship, there should exist several words exhibiting systematic similarities, like the d vs. th in German dick, Ding, Bad vs. English thick, thing, bath and probably hundreds more.

Those three pairs coincide in two sounds and have a systematic difference in the third one. Still no proof, but a very good start. There are of course for that pair of languages many more parallels, so we can rather safely conclude that the two languages have a close connection in their development.

Take, for another example, no. 15 from the list. The only similarity is the ‘n’, the other sounds are dissimilar.

I get especially suspicious when tonal languages like Vietnamese and Thai are compared to non-tonal languages like Samoan, Indonesian and Tagalog. To believe in any "genetic" relationship in such cases, it should in the first place be shown when and how they diverged, and then like for all cases, massive evidence like systematic sound correspondences for complete words, similarities in grammar, comparable syntaxes. All of those factors must of course be researched in a way that makes borrowing a less probable alternative.

Isn’t that the "Austric" theory? But I thought it only concerned Austronesian and Malayo-Polynesian languages, not Tai-Kadai ones like Thai or Lao.

Another interesting point concerning SE Asian languages is the words for the numbers 2 and 3 in Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Indonesian : dua - tiga
Maori : rua - toru
Malagasy : roa - telo
Tagalog : dalawa - tatlo
Tahitian : piti - toru
Samoan : luu - tolu

Would you agree with the ones that claim that the similarities of these words with PIE is a sign of early contact between Proto-Indo-Europeans and Asians in Northern Asia?