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Register a new userThe origins of the Malagasy people, some certainties and a few mysteries
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Maurizio Serva
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The Malagasy language belongs to the Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family, the language most closely connected to Malagasy dialects is Maanyan (Kalimantan), but Malay as well other Indonesian and Philippine languages are also related. The African contribution is very high in the Malagasy genetic make-up (about 50%) but negligible in the language. Because of the linguistic link, it is widely accepted that the island was settled by Indonesian sailors after a maritime trek but date and place of landing are still debated. The 50% Indonesian genetic contribution to present Malagasy points in a different direction then Maanyan for the Asian ancestry, therefore, the ethnic composition of the Austronesian settlers is also still debated. In this talk I mainly review the joint research of Filippo Petroni, Dima Volchenkov, Soren Wichmann and myself which tries to shed new light on these problems. The key point is the application of a new quantitative methodology which is able to find out the kinship relations among languages (or dialects). New techniques are also introduced in order to extract the maximum information from these relations concerning time and space patterns.
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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.
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