Narratives and Indigenous History

Abstract

Folk narratives are sources of information on the movements of people from one region to another, and who take with them their complex and plural speech systems. Other facts arising from their migrations include the routes taken, the motivations for their migration, the topography with its flora and fauna along the way of travel, and the meeting with people of different ethnolinguistic groups. Data for this study represents all the three main regions of Malaysia: The Malay Peninsula, Sabah, and Sarawak, each with its own composition of indigenous groups. Information derived from the narratives are placed in different categories which are not all shared by the three regions. But the common factors present in all the three are the push and the pull factors. However, exponents of these factors differ from one region to the other. This study contributes to an understanding of the growth of geolinguistic domains of the different indigenous ethnic groups of Malaysia as we see them today.