Malagasy Language - History

History

The Malagasy language is not related to nearby African languages, instead it is the westernmost member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. This was noted in 1708 by the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland.

It is related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and more closely to the Southeast Barito languages spoken in Borneo except for its Polynesian morphophonemics. According to Roger Blench (2010), the earliest form of language spoken on Madagascar could have had some non-Austronesian substrata. Malagasy shares much of its basic vocabulary with the Ma'anyan language, a language from the region of the Barito River in southern Borneo. This indicates that Madagascar was first settled by Austronesian people from Maritime Southeast Asia who had passed through Borneo. According to the literature, the first Austronesian settlement may have taken place around the 7th century AD. The migrations continued along the first millennium, as confirmed by linguistics researchers who showed the close relationship between the Malagasy language and Old Malay and Old Javanese languages of this period. Far later, ca. 1000 A.D., the original Austronesian settlers must have mixed with Bantus and Arabs, amongst others. Thus, the Malagasy language also includes some borrowings from Arabic and Bantu languages (especially the Sabaki branch, from which most notably Swahili derives).

There is evidence that the predecessor(s) of the Malagasy dialects first arrived in the southern stretch of the east coast of Madagascar.

The language has a written literature going back presumably to the 15th century. When the French established Fort-Dauphin in the 17th century, they found an Arabico-Malagasy script in use, known as Sorabe. The oldest known manuscript in that script is a short Malagasy-Dutch vocabulary from the early 17th century first published in 1908 by Gabriel Ferrand though the script must have been introduced into the southeast area of Madagascar in the 15th century. Radama I, the first literate representative of the Merina monarchy, though extensively versed in the Arabico-Malagasy tradition, opted for alphabetization in Latin characters, by David Jones, and invited the Protestant London Missionary Society to establish schools and churches.

Malagasy has a tradition of oratory arts and poetic histories and legends. The most well-known is the national epic, Ibonia, about a Malagasy folk hero of the same name.

The first book to be printed in Malagasy was the Bible, which was translated into Malagasy in 1835 by British Protestant missionaries working in the highlands area of Madagascar. The first bilingual renderings of religious texts are those by Étienne de Flacourt, who also published the first dictionary of the language.