Akar Nusa
At a market in Antananarivo, a Malagasy trader counts out money. She has probably never been to Malaysia. Yet her language and Malay share a very old family tree.
The story
Languages are like families. They have ancestors and cousins. The Austronesian family is among the largest in the world. It includes Malay, Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, the languages of Taiwan's Indigenous peoples, Hawaiian, Maori and Malagasy.
The linguist Robert Blust spent his career describing this family. His 2013 book, The Austronesian languages, is the first single-authored book to describe the whole family, and the Australian National University has made it free to read online. His theory that the homeland lay in Taiwan is widely accepted, according to a memorial published in the journal Mother Tongue. From there, Austronesian speakers spread to places that include Madagascar, Hawaii and New Zealand.
A 2009 study in Science used computer methods on the words of 400 languages. It also placed the beginning in Taiwan, about 5,230 years ago. It found pauses and bursts, with the bursts linked to better tools, boats and ways of organising communities.
Madagascar is the most surprising branch. Malagasy is spoken off the coast of Africa, but its words come from Borneo. A 2011 study of 23 Malagasy dialects found that they belong to the Greater Barito East group of Borneo languages, and that the closest relative is Ma'anyan, spoken by the Ma'anyan Dayak people along the Barito River in Kalimantan. The author suggests that colonisation happened around 650 CE, probably in a single founding event, and that Ma'anyan people may have travelled as subordinates of Malay sailors. Other scholars give other dates, so we say "about the seventh century".
Malay itself is part of the same western branch. We will tell more of its name and history in the story "Where does the word Melayu come from?".
One more point. A language can travel without everyone's ancestors travelling. Stoneking and colleagues reviewed the evidence in 2023 and found that even when farming, language and people spread together, what happens when newcomers meet locals is very varied. That is why we do not say that speaking Malay means having one particular ancestry.
Where you can still see it today
- In everyday words. Language scholars found the family by comparing basic words across these languages.
- In place names. Many places in Malaysia carry names from Malay and from the languages of Sabah and Sarawak.
- In Madagascar. Malay and Javanese loan-words are common in Malagasy, according to the sources we read.
- In the Blust book. Anyone can read it free online.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
A region estimate may show links to island Southeast Asia, which is where Austronesian languages are spoken. But language is not DNA. People can change their language, and languages can be learned by people of any ancestry.
DNA cannot decide race, religion or bumiputera status, and speaking a language does not prove an ancestry either.
