Malagasy language

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Malagasy redirects here. For the Malagasy ethnic group, see Malagasy people. For the residents or citizens of Madagascar, see Demographics of Madagascar.

Malagasy
Spoken in:	Madagascar, Comoros, Réunion, Mayotte
Total speakers:	17 million
Language family:	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Borneo-Philippines Barito Malagasy
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	`mg`
ISO 639-2:	`mlg`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	variously: `mlg` — Malagasy (generic) `xmv` — Antankarana Malagasy `bhr` — Bara Malagasy `msh` — Masikoro Malagasy `bmm` — N. Betsimisaraka Malagasy `plt` — Plateau Malagasy `skg` — Sakalava Malagasy `bjq` — S. Betsimisaraka Malagasy `tdx` — Tandroy-Mahafaly Malagasy `txy` — Tanosy Malagasy `xmw` — Tsimihety Malagasy
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Malagasy (in French also: Malgache) is the national language of Madagascar.

1 History
2 Grammatical features
3 Orthography
- 3.1 Diacritics
4 Dictionaries
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] History

Malagasy is unrelated to nearby African languages, being instead the westernmost member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, a fact noted as long ago as the eighteenth century. It is related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and more closely with the South-east Barito group of languages spoken in Borneo. Malagasy shares 90% of its basic vocabulary with Maanyan, a language from the region of the Barito River in southern Borneo. This indicates that Madagascar was first settled by Indonesians from this area, though it is not clear precisely when or why such colonisation took place. Later, the original Indonesian settlers must have mixed with East Africans and Arabs, amongst others^{[citation needed]}.

The Malagasy language also includes borrowings from Bantu languages, Swahili and Arabic, as well as from French (the former colonial rulers of Madagascar) and English (spoken by 18th century pirates who made the island their base).

The language has a written literature going back to the 15th century, and a rich tradition of oral and poetic histories and legends. The most famous is the national epic, Ibonia, about a Malagasy folk hero of the same name.

[edit] Grammatical features

Malagasy has a highly unusual Verb Object Subject word order. Verbs can be either sejunctive (having a separate object) or adjunctive (taking a joined subject, like a personal pronoun). Sejunctive forms are used for active verbs, while adjunctive forms are used for the passive voice. There are three tenses: past, present and future.

Nouns have no grammatical gender or number. There is a complex series of personal and demonstrative pronouns, depending on the speaker's familiarity and closeness to the referrant.

Words are accented on the penultimate syllable, unless the word ends in ka, tra or na, in which case they are accented on the antepenultimate syllable. Unstressed vowels are often elided; thus fanorona is pronounced [fa'nurn] ("fa-NOORN") and Malagasy sounds like its French transliteration Malgache.

[edit] Orthography

Malagasy has been written using the Latin alphabet since 1823, before which the Arabic Ajami script or sorabe as it is known in Madagascar was used for astrological and magical texts. Orthography maps rather straightforwardly into phonetics, with a few exceptions. The letter i is replaced by y at the end of words, and o is pronounced /u/.

The alphabet consists of 21 letters: a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, v, y, z.

@ is used informally as a short form for amin'ny, which is a preposition followed by the definite form, meaning for instance with the.

[edit] Diacritics

Diacritics are not obligatory in standard Malagasy. They may however be used in the following ways:

` (grave accent) shows the stressed syllable in a word. It is frequently used for disambiguation. For instance in "tanàna" (town) and "tanana" (hand), where the word that is an exception to the usual pronunciation rules (tanàna) gets an accent. Using accent on the word that follows the pronunciation rules ("tànana") is less common, mainly in dictionaries.
´ (acute accent) may be used in
- very old dictionaries, along with grave accent
- dialects such as Bara
- French (Tuléar) and French-spelled (Antsirabé) names. Malagasy versions are Toliara/Toliary and Antsirabe.
^ (circumflex) is used as follows:
- ô shows that the letter is pronunced /o/ and not /u/, in malagasified foreign words (hôpitaly) and dialects (Tôlan̈aro). In standard Malagasy, "ao" is used instead.
- sometimes the single-letter words "a" and "e" are written "â" and "ê" but it does not change the pronunciation
¨ (diaeresis) is used with n̈ in dialects for a velar nasal /ŋ/. Examples are place names such as Tôlan̈aro, Antsiran̈ana, Iharan̈a, Anantson̈o. This can be seen in maps from FTM, the national institute of geodesy and cartography.
~ (tilde) is used in ñ sometimes, perhaps when the writer cannot produce an n̈. In Ellis' Bara dialect dictionary, it is used for velar nasal /ŋ/ as well as palatal nasal /ɲ/.

[edit] Dictionaries

The first known Vocabulaire Anglais-Malagasy was published in 1729. An 892 page Malagasy-English dictionary was published by James Richardson of the London Missionary Society in 1885. It is available as a reprint. It seems that a similar English-Malagasy dictionary was never published. Later works have been of lesser size.

Richardson: A New Malagasy-English Dictionary. Farnborough, England: Gregg Press 1967, 892 p. ISBN 0-576-11607-6
Diksionera Malagasy-Englisy. Antananarivo: Trano Printy Loterana 1973, 103 p.
An Elementary English-Malagasy Dictionary. Antananarivo: Trano Printy Loterana 1969, 118 p.
English-Malagasy Phrase Book. Antananarivo: Editions Madprint 1973, 199 p. (Les Guides de Poche de Madagasikara.)
Paginton, K: English-Malagasy Vocabulary. Antananarivo: Trano Printy Loterana 1970, 192 p.
Rakibolana Malagasy. Fianarantsoa: Régis RAJEMISOA - RAOLISON 1995, 1061 p.

[edit] References

Biddulph, Joseph. An Introduction to Malagasy. Wales, 1997. ISBN 1-897-99915-1
Matthew E. Hules, et al (2005). The Dual Origin of the Malagasy in Island Southeast Asia and East Africa: Evidence from Maternal and Paternal Lineages. American Journal of Human Genetics, 76:894-901, 2005.