The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages. They are widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. Malagasy is a geographic outlier, which is spoken on Madagascar. The Malayo-Polynesian (MP) languages are divided into two major subgroups, the Western MP and the Central-Eastern MP.

The Malayo-Polynesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word) to express the plural, and like other Austronesian languages have a low entropy ; that is, the text is quite repetitive in terms of the frequency of sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] or [mpt] in English). Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number.

Western

Western Malayo-Polynesian has 300 million speakers and includes Bahasa Indonesia and Malay, Javanese, Malagasy, Tagalog, Ilokano and Cebuano, Buginese, as well as many others.

Eastern

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian has two subgroups: Polynesian and Micronesian . Micronesian includes the languages spoken by the native peoples of Micronesia such as Nauruan, Sama and Chamorro. Polynesian languages include Hawai'ian, Māori, Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan and Tuvaluan. All of the said languages have official status in the countries and territories of the Pacific Ocean. Collectively they are spoken by about 1 million people.