A Collection of Interesting Languages of the World 58: Why is a Borneo Language in Africa? ~ Malagasy

1. Introduction: Tilting your head while looking at a map

I would like you to spread out a map. On the far right edge of the African continent, floating in the Indian Ocean—that is Madagascar.

Now, which language do you think is closest to the one spoken on this island?

Neighboring Mozambique? Swahili from the African continent? Or perhaps Arabic?

The correct answer is Ma'anyan (spoken in Borneo, Indonesia).

It is about 400km in a straight line from the African continent, yet the "sister language" of Malagasy exists on an island in Southeast Asia over 7,000km away. What does this mean? Solving this mystery reveals a story of humanity's epic voyage.

2. Location and People: An African island that is "Asian" through and through

Madagascar has an area of 587,000 square kilometers, making it the fourth largest island in the world, about 1.6 times the size of Japan. The population is about 25 million, and almost all of them have Malagasy as their mother tongue.

While it is located in Africa, its cultural, linguistic, and ethnic roots are deeply connected to Asia. People living in the central highlands have Southeast Asian features, and Southeast Asian culture, such as rice cultivation, terraced fields, and wooden architecture, remains strong.

On the other hand, with the addition of Bantu people who crossed over from the African continent and Arabs who came for trade, the Malagasy language still carries that history in its vocabulary to this day.

3. A 7,000km Voyage: A miraculous migration with no records

Malagasy belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, and it is believed to be the result of a migration from the Malay Archipelago across the Indian Ocean around the 5th century AD. There are no historical records of this migration.

There are no records. Yet, the language proves it.

According to findings in comparative linguistics, Malagasy is phylogenetically closest to the Austronesian language family, which includes the Ma'anyan language spoken in the Barito River basin in southern Borneo, and it is thought that Malagasy diverged from Ma'anyan and others about 1,200 to 1,300 years ago.

The straight-line distance from Borneo to Madagascar is about 7,300km. Malagasy is the westernmost Austronesian language in the world, brought by Austronesian speakers from the Sunda Islands (Indonesia).

People who rode outrigger canoes and crossed the Indian Ocean guided by the stars. Their language still lives on this island today.

4. The "Family Tree" of Languages: A large family spreading from Southeast Asia to Africa

The Austronesian language family is a language family that spreads from Taiwan to the islands of Southeast Asia, the islands of the Pacific, and Madagascar, with a very wide distribution from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east, and from New Zealand in the south to Taiwan in the north. It likely began to diverge from Proto-Austronesian about 6,000 years ago.

Within this large family, Malagasy occupies the special position of being the westernmost language.

Since then, due to intermarriage with the Bantu people who came from the African coast and Arabs who came for trade, the language is based on Austronesian but also contains Bantu, Arabic, and Sanskrit loanwords.

In other words, the vocabulary of Malagasy is truly a "language of the crossroads," influenced by all directions of the Indian Ocean trade sphere: Southeast Asia, Africa, Arabia, and India.

5. Grammatical Features: The world's rare "Verb-Object-Subject" word order

What surprises linguists most about Malagasy grammar is its word order.

In Japanese, it is "I (subject) -> book (object) -> read (verb)" (SOV), and in English, it is "I (subject) -> read (verb) -> the book (object)" (SVO). So, what about Malagasy?

"Read (verb) -> book (object) -> I (subject)" (VOS).

Malagasy has a Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) word order. This word order is extremely rare among the world's languages; while VOS is the fourth most common word order globally, it is overwhelmingly less frequent compared to SOV (Japanese, Hindi), SVO (English, Chinese), and VSO (Irish, Filipino).

Let's look at it specifically.

The verb comes first, and the subject comes last. This structure, which feels like "reverse order" to Japanese speakers, is completely natural in Malagasy.

6. The magic of "focus": Verb forms change the meaning of the sentence

An even more interesting feature of Malagasy grammar is the "focus" system.

In English, there is only one way to say "I wash my hands with soap," but in Malagasy, the verb form changes depending on "what you want to emphasize."

Malagasy has aspects (perfective, imperfective, and prospective) and uses constructions (focus) to emphasize time, place, means, etc. Focus includes actor focus, object focus, locative focus, and circumstantial focus, and the verb changes its form according to the three aspects and four focuses.

In other words, "I wash my hands," "hands are washed," and "wash with soap" each have different verb forms. Depending on what element you want to emphasize, the verb's prefixes and suffixes change entirely.

7. Seven levels of distance: A language with 7 types of "here"

There is another unique feature of Malagasy. It is the complexity of demonstratives.

Japanese has four levels of "ko-so-a-do" (this/that/that over there/which). English only has two levels: "this/that." So, what about Malagasy?

Malagasy demonstratives distinguish distance from the speaker in seven levels and are further divided by whether they are "visible/invisible."

For the adverb meaning "here," there are seven words—atỳ, àto, ào, àtsy, àny, aròa, and arỳ—used when the location is visible, and another seven words used when it is not. In total, there are 14 different ways to distinguish "here" and "there."

8. A language that crossed 7,000 km is still alive today

The story of the Malagasy language began with one of the most astonishing voyages in human history. Over 1,000 years ago, maritime people from Borneo crossed the Indian Ocean in outrigger canoes and reached the great African island. Their language still lives on today as the mother tongue of approximately 25 million people.

The grammar is equally fascinating. It features a VOS word order where the verb comes first, a focus system where the verb form changes depending on the element being emphasized, and demonstratives that express distance in seven stages... All of these are deeply connected to Austronesian languages located 7,000 km away.

The next time you hear the name Madagascar, I hope you remember not only the baobab trees and lemurs, but also the language of the people who traveled from Borneo.Think of it as a Southeast Asian language at the easternmost edge of Africa that speaks in the order of "read → book → I."

How was it?

This blog introduces other interesting languages from around the world, so please take a look.