The origins of the Malagasy people, some certainties and a few mysteries

TL;DR

This paper reviews research on the origins of the Malagasy people, combining linguistic and genetic data, and introduces new quantitative methods to analyze language relationships and their historical and geographical implications.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantitative methodology for analyzing kinship among languages, providing new insights into the settlement history of Madagascar.

Findings

High African genetic contribution (~50%) in Malagasy

Linguistic links primarily to Maanyan and Indonesian languages

New techniques reveal time and space patterns in language kinship

Abstract

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, S\"oren 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.