Dialects of Madagascar

Abstract

All results in this paper are based upon a new dataset consisting in 60 Swadesh lists of 207 items, overall 12,420 terms collected during 2018-2019. Each list corresponds to a different variety of Malagasy, which is not simply identified by the name of the ethnicity but also by the precise location where the variety was collected. This is very important since some traditional ethnic groups are a heritage of historical events rather than representing communities with similar habits and dialects. This new dataset is by far the best available, both for dimension and completeness. The varieties are classified both by standard tools, as the trees generated by UPGMA and NJ which privilege genealogy by detecting vertical transmissions, and by a new method which privileges horizontal exchanges. The new method results in a two-dimensional chart of Madagascar which realistically reproduces geography despite being generated only by comparison of words. The landing date of the ancestors of Malagasy is determined about 650 CE. This result is obtained by a straightforward approach based on the comparison of the UPGMA Malagasy family tree with the analogous tree of Romance family of languages for which all dates are well historically attested. We also propose an improved definition of Diversity computed for every locus in Madagascar and not only in places where the dialects were collected. Moreover, Diversity becomes a locally determined quantity as it is usually in biology. Diversity differences point to the SouthEast coast as the location where the first colonizers landed or, at least, where Malagasy variants started their dispersion. Finally, we find that the dialect spoken by the Mikea, a hunter-gatherer people in the SouthWest of Madagascar, is not very different from the variants of their neighbours Vezo and Masikoro. Therefore, Mikea unlikely can be linked to eventual aboriginal populations living in Madagascar prior to the main colonization event in 650 CE.

Malagasy dialects in Mayotte

“…A complete overview of the geographical locations of the 62 dialects can be appreciated in Fig. 1, the colors of the 60 continental varieties correspond to the classification which we proposed in [1], while the color of the 2 Mayotte dialects is brown. Eventually, the precise latitude and longitude coordinates as well as the names of the corresponding towns/villages and ethnicities of all the 62 varieties can be found in the Supporting Information of this paper (Table 1).…”

“…The Austronesian expansion, which very likely originated in the South of China and went through Taiwan, is probably the most spectacular event of maritime colonization in human history, Madagascar being the Western edge of this expansion. The colonizers from Indonesia probably landed around 650 CE in the South-East of Madagascar [1]. There is a huge literature on this subject in linguistics [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and genetics [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] and a role of the Comoros archipelago is occasionally evoked.…”

“…Each list was furnished and checked at least by three native language speakers which, for each given meaning, were asked to furnish the most common word in their dialect as spoken in their town/village. The 60 lists can be found in the Supporting Information of paper [1].…”

“…In the idea of Swadesh τ should have been a universal constant, but this is not the case [24], [25], which, among other things, entails that some languages had and have a slower (or faster) evolution than others. Indeed, the value of τ is irrelevant in this paper, notwithstanding, for comparison purposes, we set τ = 5136 years, which is the value that we found in [1] for the Malagasy family (meaning the sixty continental varieties). This value is substantially meaningless when referred to distances involving the two Mayotte dialects because of the strong distortion due to the important horizontal transfer from the local Comorian Bantu (Shimaore).…”

“…In order to grasp the information conveyed by horizontal transfers between continental varieties and to clarify the position of Kiantalaotsy with respect to them, we adapt the method proposed in [1], which, in turn, is an implementation of the procedure in [27]. This method allows to construct the purely lexical geography of Madagascar (plus Mayotte) by the matrix of genealogical distances.…”