  The origin of Malagasy DNA is half African and half Indonesian, nevertheless
the Malagasy language, spoken by the entire population, belongs to the
Austronesian family. The language most closely related to Malagasy is Maanyan
(Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family), but related languages
are also in Sulawesi, Malaysia and Sumatra. For this reason, and because
Maanyan is spoken by a population which lives along the Barito river in
Kalimantan and which does not possess the necessary skill for long maritime
navigation, the ethnic composition of the Indonesian colonizers is still
unclear.
  There is a general consensus that Indonesian sailors reached Madagascar by a
maritime trek, but the time, the path and the landing area of the first
colonization are all disputed. In this research we try to answer these problems
together with other ones, such as the historical configuration of Malagasy
dialects, by types of analysis related to lexicostatistics and glottochronology
which draw upon the automated method recently proposed by the authors
\cite{Serva:2008, Holman:2008, Petroni:2008, Bakker:2009}. The data were
collected by the first author at the beginning of 2010 with the invaluable help
of Joselin\`a Soafara N\'er\'e and consist of Swadesh lists of 200 items for 23
dialects covering all areas of the Island.
