Barito

The Barito languages are some twenty Malayo-Polynesian tongues named after the Barito River of South Kalimantan, though some linguists treat them as a contact area rather than a single lineage. Their speakers are Dayak peoples of the central and southern Borneo interior, among them the Ngaju and the Ma'anyan.

The Ma'anyan preserve the memory of Nansarunai, a polity that had arisen before the twelfth century and was destroyed by Majapahit expeditions by 1389, a disaster their oral tradition calls the Javanese destruction and which scattered their sub-groups upriver.

Southeast Barito speech was carried across the Indian Ocean: Ma'anyan is the closest relative of Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, taken there by traders and migrants between the seventh and thirteenth centuries and layered with Malay and Javanese loanwords.