Malay Influence on Malagasy: Linguistic and Culture-Historical Implications

INTRODUCTION. In 1951 0. C. Dahl wrote a dissertation on the relationship between Malagasy and Maanyan, a language of the SoutheastBarito region in South Kalimantan. Acting on a suggestion from W. Aichele about a possible close genetic relationship between these two languages, he showed convincingly that they were indeed more closely related to each other than either is to any other language.1 Today few Austronesianists will doubt the outcome of Dahl's dissertation, which supersedes previous theories about the origin of Malagasy. Dahl estimates the migration of the Malagasy to their present homeland to have taken place in the fifth century A.D. at the earliest, because the first traces of Indian influence in Indonesia, which were found in East Kalimantan,2 are from this period, and Malagasy has a few Sanskrit loanwords which are almost all found in other Indonesian languages as well. Dahl (1951) leaves open the question whether or not contacts between the Malagasy and Indonesians continued after the migration, and if they did, until what period. He gives a survey of Arabic and Portuguese sources mentioning such contacts, but he cannot determine whether they are decisive evidence or not. He does not consider the possibility of borrowing from other Indonesian languages in Malagasy, although in a later publication he uses borrowing (from Malay and Madurese) as a possible explanation for some irregular sound correspondences in the Malagasy lexicon (Dahl 1977a: 95). However, this borrowing is always supposed to have taken place at a period when the ancestors of the Malagasy still lived in South Kalimantan.3 In this article I would like to present evidence for lexical borrowing from Malay and Javanese into Malagasy.4 Rather than giving a full list of all possible-or even probable-Malay borrowings, I prefer to present a small number of lexical items that can only be from Malay (? 1). Once I have established borrowing from Malay and Javanese into Malagasy as a