Madagascar lies off the coast of East Africa. Yet its main language, Malagasy, has its closest linguistic relative in a place thousands of kilometers away, Ma'anyan, a language spoken by the Dayak people along the Barito River in South Kalimantan.
The two regions are separated by the Indian Ocean. So how did a language spoken in Kalimantan end up being so closely related to a language in Madagascar?
Malagasy Points Back to Kalimantan
A 2012 study in PLOS ONE compared 23 Malagasy dialects and placed them in the Greater Barito East group. Within this group, Ma'anyan was found to be the closest linguistic relative of Malagasy.
Ma'anyan is spoken by Dayak communities around the Barito River, particularly in South Kalimantan. This closeness suggests that the language carried by the ancestors of Malagasy speakers was closely connected to languages once spoken in Kalimantan.
But where did these ancestors come from?
Linguistic and genetic studies suggest that they came from Southeast Asia and reached Madagascar around 1,000 to 1,400 years ago. One estimate places the arrival of Austronesian speakers around 650 CE on Madagascar's southeastern coast, near what are now Mananjary and Manakara.
It was a remarkably long journey. From Southeast Asia, they would have had to cross around 7,000 kilometers of the Indian Ocean.
Close in Language, but Different in DNA
The close relationship between Malagasy and Ma'anyan raises an obvious question. Were Ma'anyan people the ones who sailed directly from Kalimantan to Madagascar?
Genetic evidence suggests the answer is more complicated.
A 2016 study in Scientific Reports compared the DNA of 211 people from South Kalimantan, including 169 Ma'anyan people, with that of Malagasy populations. It found that a genetic component making up around 80 to 95 percent of Ma'anyan ancestry appeared in only about 2 to 15 percent of Malagasy people.
In other words, Malagasy is linguistically closest to Ma'anyan, but most Malagasy ancestry does not come directly from the Ma'anyan people.
The same study still found genetic closeness between Malagasy populations and groups from South Kalimantan. It also found connections with populations from Java, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi.
Meanwhile, a 2015 study in Human Biology offered another clue. The genetic connection between Malagasy and Ma'anyan was relatively weak, while stronger evidence pointed to Indonesian seafaring groups.
One of them was the Bajo people, who showed genetic closeness to some Malagasy samples in the 2016 study.
Ma'anyan and Southeast Asia's Maritime Networks
The difference between language and DNA does not mean that one of them is wrong. Languages can move from one community to another as people mix and live within the same trading or maritime networks.
This could explain why Ma'anyan has left such a strong mark on Malagasy, even though the genetic ancestry of Malagasy people came from several Southeast Asian populations.
A 2016 study in Molecular Biology and Evolution, for example, identified the Banjar people as the most likely source of Malagasy Asian ancestry among the Southeast Kalimantan populations it examined.
A study in Scientific Reports also proposed that Malagasy's Asian ancestors may have included Ma'anyan people who had mixed with other groups within a network influenced by Srivijaya.
The close relationship between Malagasy and Ma'anyan is therefore better understood as a linguistic trace of a much longer movement of people across Southeast Asia, rather than evidence that one group simply sailed directly from Kalimantan to Madagascar.
More than a thousand years later, that trace still survives in the Malagasy language.
References:
- Brucato, N., et al. (2016). Malagasy genetic ancestry comes from an historical Malay trading post in Southeast Borneo. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 33(9), 2396-2400. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msw117
- Kusuma, P., et al. (2015). Mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome suggest the settlement of Madagascar by Indonesian sea nomad populations. BMC Genomics, 16, 191. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-015-1394-7
- Kusuma, P., et al. (2016). Contrasting linguistic and genetic origins of the Asian source populations of Malagasy. Scientific Reports, 6, 26066. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep26066
- Pierron, D., et al. (2018). Strong selection during the last millennium for African ancestry in the admixed population of Madagascar. Nature Communications, 9, 932. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03342-5
- Serva, M. (2012). The settlement of Madagascar: What dialects and languages can tell us. PLOS ONE, 7(2), e30666. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030666
