Sunda–Sulawesi languages

The Sunda–Sulawesi languages (also known as Inner Hesperonesian or Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian languages) are a putative branch of the Austronesian family posited in Wouk and Ross (2002). They include most of the languages of Sulawesi and the Greater Sunda Islands, as well as a few outliers such as Chamorro and Palauan.

In this proposal the previously posited clade of Western Malayo-Polynesian languages (WMP), aka Hesperonesian, has been broken up into "inner" (Sunda–Sulawesi) and "outer" (Borneo–Philippines) clades, and Western Malayo-Polynesian is considered merely a geographic term.

The greatest diversity of languages is on the island of Sulawesi, the likely homeland of the Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian languages. However, the group has not been taken up by other historical linguists, and it may be that Sunda–Sulawesi is itself not a genealogical clade, but paraphyletic, simply being the Nuclear MP languages outside Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (assuming the latter is a valid group, which is not clear).

Not all the languages of Sulawesi belong to the Sunda–Sulawesi (Inner Hesperonesian) clade. The twenty languages of the northern peninsula of Sulawesi and neighboring islands to the north are instead part of the Borneo–Philippines branch (Outer Hesperonesian).