Taiwanese aborigines (Chinese: yuanzhumin; Peh-oe-ji: goan-chu-bin; literally 'original inhabitants') may have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 17th century. Taiwanese aborigines are Austronesian peoples, with linguistic and genetic ties to other Austronesian ethnic groups, such as peoples of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Oceania. For centuries, Taiwan's aboriginal peoples experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing peoples. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage and other dispassionate intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. Taiwan's Austronesian speakers were formerly distributed over much of the island's rugged central mountain range and were concentrated in villages along the alluvial plains. As of 2009, their total population was around 500,000 (approximately 2 percent of Taiwan's population).