Many western Austronesian languages exhibit a type of verbal inflection known as Philippine-type voice, which, in a descriptive sense, tracks the grammatical role of topics or relativized phrases. In this presentation I discuss (i) how new comparative evidence from Philippine and Formosan languages shed new light on the nature of this voice system, and (ii) how similar inflectional systems found in Nilotic and Caucasian inform us of an understudied typology of "Philippine-type voice" cross language families.