Being a Malaysian (specifically, Sarawakian) Bisaya, I picked up on how the Filipino Tagalog language has some similarity to Sarawakian Bisaya. However, I've since found out that Filipino Bisayas speak Cebuano, which defeats whatever case I had built.
I also notice that we have strikingly similar physical characteristics to Filipino Bisaya folk as well, but I guess this is attributable as to how we're the same race(?) - general South East Asian characteristics.
I've tried doing my own research through Wikipedia and some journal articles (whatever I could find through my University's online library), there just isn't any solid literature on this.
I just want to properly know my roots, and I was hoping if anyone could help me out here.
Are my ancestors from the Philippines? If not, is there a reason to this coincidence that two linguistically and physically similar ethnicities are named Bisaya?
I'm also open to any possible (insofar as it is credible) hypotheses otherwise!
Actually, colloquially Cebuano is usually called “Bisaya” in the language. So indeed there is the Malaysian Bisaya people/language and the Filipino Bisaya people/language. Overall, the people are related in the same way that all Filipinos, Malaysians, and Indonesians are closely related ethnolinguistically (with the exception of the Chinese groups in each country). They are all Austronesians of the Malayo-Polynesian branch and all have a very ancient history of interactions with each other. In fact, Sulu, which is now a part of the Philippines, used to own Sabah, which is now a part of Malaysia.
However, “bisaya” as a word is not actually native to either the Bisaya people of Malaysia or Bisaya people of the Philippines. Rather, bisaya seems to come from the Sanskrit word vijaya, which means “victory”. Vijaya pops up throughout Southeast Asia. For example, Srivijaya in what is now Indonesia, Vijaya in what is now Viet Nam, and of course Bisayas in the Philippines and Malaysia. There are many, many Sanskrit words in the languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and this is just one of those.
Also, it’s interesting to note that the native writing systems of all three countries are related, and in particular the writing of Sulawesi appears extremely similar to the writing in the Philippines. This suggests that Sulawesi either got its writing from the Philippines originally or the inverse.
So, yes. This region of SE Asia has lots of very old connections, very closely related languages and cultures, but as to whether your people are directly descended from Filipinos, I don’t think so. At least not in the way you think. One theory is that Austronesian languages did pass through the Philippines first when they were originally spreading, which would of course mean that any movements of people along with the languages would have also come through the Philippines first. But this would have been much longer ago than you are referring to. If there was a more recent migration, I don’t think so. There are actually distinct linguistic differences between languages in Malaysia and Indonesia versus the Philippines. The Philippine Language branch of Malayo-Polynesian has much more conservative grammars and syntaxes, and if your language does not possess these features, then I would personally doubt there was a large scale recent migration.