Malagasy
Language · official in 1 country
Malagasy came to Madagascar with settlers from the Sunda Islands, some 7,300 kilometres away, and its closest relative is Maʼanyan, still spoken on Borneo. Written in Latin letters since 1823 and in the Arabic-based Sorabe before that, its standard form rests on the Merina dialect and is official in Madagascar alongside French.
The language on record
- Own name
- Malagasy
- ISO 639-1
- MG
- ISO 639-3
- MLG
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Barito
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Malagasy is official
Madagascar is the one country on record. Its 2010 constitution names Malagasy and French; the 2007 text had added English as a third.
Official beside Malagasy
About Malagasy
How Malagasy crossed the Indian Ocean
Austronesian speakers settled Madagascar around the 5th century AD, or perhaps between the 7th and 13th centuries. Otto Dahl showed in 1951 that Malagasy and Maʼanyan, an East Barito language of Kalimantan, are especially close. Malay and Javanese words came with the early settlement and trade. Sanskrit words arrived mostly through Javanese. After about 1000 AD, traders and settlers added Bantu and Arabic ones.
Why a king chose Latin letters
When the French set up Fort-Dauphin in the 17th century they found Sorabe, meaning "large writings", an Arabic-derived script used mainly for astrological and magical texts. In 1823 Radama I, the first literate ruler of the Merina monarchy and himself trained in Sorabe, adopted a Latin system worked out by David Jones and invited the London Missionary Society to open schools. The Bible, translated in 1835, was the first book printed in Malagasy in Latin characters.
The alphabet has 21 letters. C, q, u, w and x are left out except in loanwords, o is read /u/ outside the north, and y replaces i at the end of a word.
What order a sentence takes
Malagasy puts the verb first, then the object, then the subject. Demonstratives stand on both sides of the noun, so ity boky ity, "this book", reads literally as "this book this".
Where the standard is used
The dialects fall into northern, central-eastern and southern groups. Standard Malagasy comes from the Merina speech of the central plateau around Antananarivo, the language of government and media, and every public school teaches all subjects in it through grade five, and history and Malagasy through high school.
Common questions
Questions about Malagasy
What language is Malagasy related to?
Maʼanyan, a Barito language of Borneo, is its closest relative. Malagasy also carries many Malay and Javanese loanwords from the period of settlement.
Is English an official language of Madagascar?
Not since 2010. The 2007 constitution made Malagasy, French and English official; the 2010 constitution of the Fourth Republic kept Malagasy and French.
What is Sorabe?
An Arabic-derived script for writing Malagasy, probably brought to the south-east of the island in the 15th century and used mainly for astrological and magical texts. The oldest known manuscript in it is a short Malagasy-Dutch vocabulary from the early 17th century, first published in 1908.