Bisaya (ethnic group)

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The Bisaya or Bisayah , sometimes called Besaya described are indigenous ethnic group of the Malay Archipelago . They call themselves tangah-tangah (people of the middle), jilama bawah or jilama sungai (river people). Their main distribution is in Sabah within the Beaufort district and along the Sungai Padas and in northern Sarawak along the Limbang River .

Settlement areas

Bisaya House (in the open-air museum of the Sabah Museum in Kota Kinabalu)

The traditional settlement areas of the Bisaya are in the middle and lower reaches of those rivers in northern Sarawak and the west coast of Sabah that flow into the Bay of Brunei .

Brunei

The bisaya include the closely related groups of Orang Bukit, Dusun and Tutong Dusun, who live along the Sungai Tutong.

Sarawak

Bisaya in Sarawak traditionally settle mainly on the tributaries of the Sungai Baram , especially on the Sungai Linai and Sungai Tutoh, as well as on the upper reaches of the Sungai Belait.

Sabah

In Sabah, the bisaya are the mostly Muslim inhabitants of the lower reaches of the Sungai Padas and Sungai Klias who cultivate wet rice ; also groups in the Bundu and Kuala Penyu areas . The Bisaya live within other ethnic groups, so that pure Bisaya settlements are difficult to identify.

Demographics

The 2010 census (2010 Census) shows a population of 39,960 Bisaya in Sabah and 7,195 in Sarawak. Bisaya in other states are of no statistical relevance.

Ethnological demarcation

Connections to the Visaya ethnic group living in the Philippines are affirmed by ethnology . Nevertheless, these are managed as an independent ethnic group.

language

The language spoken by the ethnic group Bisaya belongs to the Idahan language family, along with the other indigenous languages ​​of Sabah, which in turn belongs to the West Malayo-Polynesian languages . The language is divided into the variants Brunei Bisaya ( ISO-639 -3 code bsb) and Sabah Bisaya ( ISO-639 -3 code bsy).

Culture

The interests of the bisaya are represented by the KDCA ( Kadazan-Dusun Cultural Association ).

literature

  • Frank M. LeBar (Ed.): Ethnic Groups of Insular Southeast Asia, Volume 1: Indonesia, Andaman Islands, and Madagascar ; Human Relations Area Files Press, New Haven, 1972 ( Bisaya chapter , 163-166).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lebar, p. 163.
  2. ^ Ethnic extract from the 2010 Population and Housing Census ; Communication from the Statistical Office of 6 September 2010.
  3. ↑ Frank M. LeBar (Ed.): Ethnic Groups of Insular Southeast Asia, Volume 2: Philippines and Formosa; Human Relations Area Files Press , p. 70, New Haven, 1972.
  4. ^ DJ Prentice: The linguistic situation in northern Borneo in: Pacific Linguistic Studies , SA Wurm and DC Laycock, (Eds.), Pacific Linguistics , Series C, No. 13, 1970.
  5. ↑ Ethnologue report for language code bsy
  6. ↑ Ethnologue report for language code bsb

Remarks

  1. ↑ The information from the census is based solely on the respondents' answers without further evidence.
  2. ↑ The Bisaya language ( ISO-639-3 code bsband bsy) is often confused with the language Bisaya n ( ISO-639-3 code ceb) spoken in the Philippines .