Malagasy language

Abstract: Linguistic, cultural and genetic characteristics of the Malagasy suggest that both Africans and Island Southeast Asians were involved in the colonization of Madagascar. Populations from the Indonesian archipelago played an especially important role because linguistic evidence suggests that the Malagasy language branches from the Southeast Barito language family of southern Borneo, Indonesia, with the closest language spoken today by the Ma’anyan. To test for a genetic link between Malagasy and these linguistically related Indonesian populations, we studied the Ma’anyan and other Indonesian ethnic groups (including the sea nomad Bajo) that, from their historical and linguistic contexts, may be modern descendants of the populations that helped enact the settlement of Madagascar. A combination of phylogeographic analysis of genetic distances, haplotype comparisons and inference of parental populations by linear optimization, using both maternal and paternal DNA lineages, suggests that Malagasy derive from multiple regional sources in Indonesia, with a focus on eastern Borneo, southern Sulawesi and the Lesser Sunda islands. Settlement may have been mediated by ancient sea nomad movements because the linguistically closest population, Ma’anyan, has only subtle genetic connections to Malagasy, whereas genetic links with other sea nomads are more strongly supported. Our data hint at a more complex scenario for the Indonesian settlement of Madagascar than has previously been recognized.

Abstract: The Malagasy language is generally considered part of the Barito languages of Borneo and these, in turn, have recently been linked to the Sama-Bajaw group. The dispersal of the Sama-Bajaw in the seventh century was impelled by the expansion of the Śrīvijaya Malay. Although there is evidence for Austronesian navigators crossing the Indian Ocean prior to 0 AD, they came from a different region of SE Asia, and were not associated with the settlement of Madagascar. The origin of Bantu words in the Malagasy lexicon has been attributed to a wide scatter of East African languages, but it appears that the source of nearly all of them is the Swahili/Sabaki group, which would have dominated the incipient trading networks in this region from the seventh and eighth centuries onwards. This paper takes as a case study the terminology of domestic animals, all of which appears to derive from languages of the Swahili group, except for nineteenth century introductions. Recent zoogeographic research also suggests the translocation of domestic and wild species across the Mozambique Channel and between the islands; and the Malagasy name for the wild pig, lambo, which reflects Austronesian names for ‘bovine’. A provisional list of Malagasy borrowings from Sabaki languages is given in an appendix.

Abstract: This article is an exploration into what a temporally and semantically ‘deep’ reading of African identity names reveals not only about the shifting meanings of ethnic naming over time but about the nature and definition of ethnic identity itself. Scholars have long recognized that identities are socially and historically constructed yet failed to sufficiently account for continuing shifts and transformations of identity consciousness within named corporate groups. Taking the case of the Merina of central Madagascar this article demonstrates that Merina identity is both an historical product of the early nineteenth century and that that identity was, at origin, a political consciousness that later became ethnicized. These conclusions are reached through a careful reading of the meanings of vernacular identity names in Malagasy language texts. By drawing comparisons between Merina and Zulu identities of the early nineteenth century, the article suggests that precolonial ‘ethnic’ identities generated through...

Abstract: The origin of Malagasy DNA is half African and half Indonesian, nevertheless the Malagasy language, spoken by the entire population, belongs to the Austronesian family. The language most closely related to Malagasy is Maanyan (Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family), but related languages are also in Sulawesi, Malaysia and Sumatra. For this reason, and because Maanyan is spoken by a population which lives along the Barito river in Kalimantan and which does not possess the necessary skill for long maritime navigation, the ethnic composition of the Indonesian colonizers is still unclear. There is a general consensus that Indonesian sailors reached Madagascar by a maritime trek, but the time, the path and the landing area of the first colonization are all disputed. In this research we try to answer these problems together with other ones, such as the historical configuration of Malagasy dialects, by types of analysis related to lexicostatistics and glottochronology which draw upon the automated method recently proposed by the authors \cite{Serva:2008, Holman:2008, Petroni:2008, Bakker:2009}. The data were collected by the first author at the beginning of 2010 with the invaluable help of Joselina Soafara Nere and consist of Swadesh lists of 200 items for 23 dialects covering all areas of the Island.