The Ivatan language, also known as Ibatan (though in ISO classification Ibatan is reserved for a closely related language spoken in the Babuyan Islands, which is assigned the code [ivb] as opposed to [ivv]) or Chirin nu Ibatan (meaning, "language or dialect of the Ivatan people"), is an Austronesian

Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...

 language spoken exclusively in the Batanes

Batanes

The Province of Batanes , also called the Batanes Islands, is a Philippine province comprising ten islands that are located in the Luzon Strait between the islands of Luzon and Taiwan...

 Islands. Despite the islands' closer proximity to Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

 than Luzon, it is important to not group the language with Formosan languages, which in fact are assigned one of ten sub-families within the Austronesian language family, whereas Ivatan is included with other Philippine languages in the Malayo-Polynesian sub-family, an immense group of 1248 languages not restricted to the languages of the Philippines, but, as the name suggests, includes Malayic and Oceanic languages.