10 - Who Were the First Malagasy, and What Did They Speak?

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter I investigate the way Malagasy split off from other Austronesian languages, and the sociopolitical circumstances under which this may have happened.

Malagasy is an Austronesian language spoken in a variety of dialects in Madagascar. It is a member of the South East Barito (henceforth SEB) language subgroup, the members of which are predominantly spoken on the eastern shores of the Barito River in South Borneo (Dahl 1951; see Map 10.1). This region is considered the original homeland of Malagasy.

Malagasy underwent influence from Malay and Javanese, the hegemonic languages par excellence in insular South East Asia (henceforth ISEA), as well as from Sanskrit. In fact, the Sanskrit loanwords in Malagasy can be shown to have been borrowed via Malay and Javanese, and not directly from a source in South Asia. Malagasy also borrowed from Austronesian languages close to South Borneo homeland: it has loanwords from South Sulawesi languages (Adelaar 1995a), and from Ngaju (Dahl 1951), which is spoken west of the Barito River (see Map 10.1).

Malay, Javanese and Sanskrit loanwords testify to the fact that already very early onwards the Malays and Javanese were passing on to other peoples in ISEA Indic cultural influences that had been transformed by their own local cultures. This must already have happened on a large scale around the time that ancestors of the present-day Malagasy people began to migrate to East Africa, which was possibly in the seventh century AD, if not earlier (see Map 10.2). Malay loanwords also enable us to see that the ancestors of the Malagasy were not only in touch with Malays in Borneo but also with Malays from Sumatra. They were so for a considerably long time, starting from before the first migrations to East Africa and continuing until after the Portuguese made their appearance in the Indian Ocean region (sixteenth century AD; Adelaar 2009, p. 158). Some Malay loanwords in East Madagascar have a Muslim signature, indicating that Islam may have been introduced from ISEA to this part of the island; other loanwords are from South Sulawesi languages, showing that there was a certain measure of inter-insular contact and ethnic integration going on across ISEA, something that does not readily appear from historical evidence based on written records (Adelaar 1995a).