Page "Urheimat" Paragraph 82

The Malagasy language of Madagascar is not related to nearby African languages, instead being the westernmost member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, a fact noted as long ago as 1708 by the Dutch scholar Adriaan van Reeland.

It is related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and more closely with the Southeast Barito group of languages spoken in Borneo except for its Polynesian morphophonemics.

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 the Malay Archipelago who had passed through Borneo.

This happened approximately 0 CE to 500 CE, before which the island of Madagascar lacked human inhabitants.

Later, the original Austronesian settlers must have mixed with East Africans and Arabs, amongst others.

The Malagasy language also includes some borrowings from Arabic, and Bantu languages ( notably Swahili ).

Limited sample size whole genome analysis of Malgasy individuals show that the African component of the Malagasy genome is most similar to modern Bantu language speaking East African populations.