Migration from Kalimantan to Madagascar

(Serie B: Skrifter)

Norwegian University Press / The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture (1991).

Hardcover Book with Dust Jacket

In this book Dahl brings together the various strands of evidence that Madagascar was peopled by a migration of people from Kalimantan in Indonesia about 1,300 years ago.

Text from the Back Cover

In 1951 Otto Christian Dahl demonstrated the close affinity of Malagasy to the Ma'anyan language in SE Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo). Thus the ancestors of the Malagasy must have migrated from Kalimantan to Madagascar. In the present book Dahl substantiates, from linguistic, cultural and historical evidence, why, how and when this migration took place. The actual time of the migration is determined by means of an inscription, partly in old Ma'anyan, found on Bangka and dated AD 686, and the Sanskrit loanwords in Malagasy, which were most likely borrowed from the Srivijaya society at that time. This dating has been further corroborated by archaeological findings of human traces in Madagascar from around AD 700. Still earlier voyages across the Indian Ocean are also discussed. In Madagascar the Ma'anyan merged with a Bantu substratum which has had a great influence on the later development of the Malagasy language.

About the Author (from the Front Flap)

Otto Christian Dahl (b. 1903) was a missionary in Madagascar from 1929 to 1957. He has studied Austronesian linguistics in Hamburg and Leiden, and took his doctorate at the University of Oslo in 1952. He has had a government scholarship in linguistics since 1967. Besides studies of modern and ancient Malagasy and comparative studies of Indonesian languages, he has also published on Proto-Austronesian and on the early development of Austronesian. He is a member of the Académie Malgache and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.