Crossword-Solution: AUSTRONESIAN 12 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

The rectangular-axe culture of north-west China spread widely, and moved southward, where the Austronesian peoples (from whom the Malays are descended) were its principal constituents, spreading that culture also to Japan.

Finally there arose from the mixture of the Yao with the Tai culture, at a rather later time, the Yüeh culture, another early Austronesian culture, which then spread over wide regions of Indonesia, and of which the axe of rectangular section, mentioned above, became typical.

The diffusion of this Austronesian language over the whole island--even amongst distinctly Negroid Bantu populations, such as the Betsileos and Tanalas--to the absolute exclusion of all other forms of speech, is an extraordinary linguistic phenomenon more easily proved than explained.

This view is also in conformity with the character of the numerous Formosan dialects, whose affinities are either with the Gyarung and others of the Asiatic Indonesian tongues, or else with the Austronesian organic speech generally, but not specially with any particular member of that family, least of all with the comparatively recent standard Malay.

The language, which has an extraordinarily rich phonetic system (as many as 25 consonantal and 35 vowel sounds), is polysyllabic and untoned, like the Austronesian, and the type also seems to resemble the Oceanic more than the Continental Mongol subdivision.