Easter Island in the Polynesian Triangle

Polynesia (from Greek: πολύς "polys" many + νῆσος "nēsos" island) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are termed Polynesians and they share many similar traits including language, culture and beliefs.[1] Historically, they were experienced sailors and used stars to navigate during the night.
The term "Polynesia" was first used in 1756 by French writer Charles de Brosses, and originally applied to all the islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a restriction on its use during a lecture to the Geographical Society of Paris.

The Polynesian people are considered to be by linguistic, archaeological and human genetic ancestry a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people and tracing Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins, ultimately, in Taiwan.
At about 2000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages began spreading from Taiwan into Island Southeast Asia.[8][9][10] Their speech of the time was not clearly related to Chinese speech of the time and Chinese speakers were all further north on the mainland at the turn of the second and third millennia BC. Taiwan was only later Sinicized via large-scale immigration accompanied by much assimilation of the Austronesian speaking indigenous people during the 17th century AD.