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Register a new userThe settlement of Madagascar: what dialects and languages can tell
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Authors
Maurizio Serva
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The dialects of Madagascar belong to the Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family and it is widely accepted that the Island was colonized by Indonesian sailors after a maritime trek which probably took place around 650 CE. The language most closely related to Malagasy dialects is Maanyan but also Malay is strongly related especially for what concerns navigation terms. Since the Maanyan Dayaks live along the Barito river in Kalimantan (Borneo) and they do not possess the necessary skill for long maritime navigation, probably they were brought as subordinates by Malay sailors. In a recent paper we compared 23 different Malagasy dialects in order to determine the time and the landing area of the first colonization. In this research we use new data and new methods to confirm that the landing took place on the south-east coast of the Island. Furthermore, we are able to state here that it is unlikely that there were multiple settlements and, therefore, colonization consisted in a single founding event. To reach our goal we find out the internal kinship relations among all the 23 Malagasy dialects and we also find out the different kinship degrees of the 23 dialects versus Malay and Maanyan. The method used is an automated version of the lexicostatistic approach. The data concerning Madagascar were collected by the author at the beginning of 2010 and consist of Swadesh lists of 200 items for 23 dialects covering all areas of the Island. The lists for Maanyan and Malay were obtained from published datasets integrated by authors interviews.
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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 Joselin`a Soafara Nere and consist of Swadesh lists of 200 items for 23 dialects covering all areas of the Island.
The idea that the distance among pairs of languages can be evaluated from lexical differences seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont DUrville. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work about the geographical division of the Pacific, he proposed a method to measure the degree of relation between languages. The method used by the modern lexicostatistics, developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1950s, measures distances from the percentage of shared cognates, which are words with a common historical origin. The weak point of this method is that subjective judgment plays a relevant role. Recently, we have proposed a new automated method which is motivated by the analogy with genetics. The new approach avoids any subjectivity and results can be easily replicated by other scholars. The distance between two languages is defined by considering a renormalized Levenshtein distance between pair of words with the same meaning and averaging on the words contained in a list. The renormalization, which takes into account the length of the words, plays a crucial role, and no sensible results can be found without it. In this paper we give a short review of our automated method and we illustrate it by considering the cluster of Malagasy dialects. We show that it sheds new light on their kinship relation and also that it furnishes a lot of new information concerning the modalities of the settlement of Madagascar.
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