The Beosi are short-statured hunter-gatherers of the central highlands of Madagascar. They are distinct from the Mikea people hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists of the lowlands.
Language
The Beosi speak a dialect of the Malagasy language, which originated in southern
Borneo. Speculation that there may be remnants of a
Vazimba language in Beosi speech was investigated by Blench & Walsh (2009). Beosi speech was found to have a relatively high proportion of vocabulary that cannot be identified with words in other varieties of Malagasy, substantially more than the Mikea dialect, and is more likely than Mikea to retain a Vazimba substrate, if such a thing even exists. The possibility is complicated by the extensive use of evasive language and cant by the Beosi, which is designed to hinder understanding by outsiders.
[Blench & Walsh, 2009 draft ms, "The vocabularies of Vazimba and Beosi: do they represent the languages of the pre-Austronesian populations of Madagascar?".]
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