Malagasy

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The national language of Madagascar, spoken by the great majority of the island's population — and an Austronesian language, whose closest known relatives are spoken in southeastern Borneo, some six thousand kilometres away across the Indian Ocean. The relationship is not a resemblance but a demonstration: Otto Christian Dahl's 1951 study established the specific link to Ma'anyan, a Barito language of Borneo, on the strength of shared sound correspondences and vocabulary, and the connection has been repeatedly confirmed since. Malagasy also records its own later history in its lexicon, carrying strata of Bantu, Arabic, Swahili and later French borrowings acquired after arrival, layered on an Austronesian core that the borrowings did not displace. The single fact of the language settles a question archaeology alone would have struggled with: Madagascar, though it lies within sight of the African mainland by the standards of ocean distance, received a founding population from island Southeast Asia. It is the westernmost point of the Austronesian world and the clearest single case of a language functioning as a migration record.