Malagasy language

Malagasy (autoglottonymous malagasy) is the Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by practically the entire population of Madagascar. In that country, the Malagasy language is considered the national language, but shares official language status with French, which remains the main language in written media and in education. There are also some Malagasy speakers on the French island of Mayotte and in communities originating from Madagascar settled in Réunion and Comoros.

Linguistic description

Classification

Malagasy belongs to the Bornean language group, which in turn belongs to the Austronesian family. The language most similar to Malagasy is Ma'anyan, spoken in southern Borneo. The apparently paradoxical fact that the language of Madagascar is of Malayo-Polynesian origin is due to the fact that the first settlers of Madagascar arrived on the island by sea from Indonesia, bringing their language and culture there.

Phonology

Malagasy words are generally stressed on the penultimate syllable, except those ending in "ka", "tra" or "na", which are stressed on the penultimate syllable. Unstressed vowels are often elided, so malagasy sounds similar to the French transcription "malagasy". Malagasy has only four vowel sounds, corresponding to the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/ and /u/ in Spanish. Therefore, the sound /o/ does not exist.

Vowels

Consonants

Writing

The Malagasy language has a written literature that probably dates back to the 15th century. When the French settled at Fort-Dauphin in the 17th century, they found an Arabic-Malagasy alphabet in use, known as the Sorabic alphabet (literally, "large writing"), which has raised the hypothesis about the existence of another type of earlier alphabet, in smaller characters, which is believed to be of Indian origin, such as the widely used in Southeast Asia).

The oldest known manuscript in the Sora-be script is a small Malagasy-Dutch vocabulary from the 17th century, published by first time in 1908 by Gabriel Ferrand although the alphabet seems to have been introduced in the south-eastern part of Madagascar from the 15th century. Radama I, the first literate representative of the unifying Merino monarchy of the kingdom of Madagascar in the 19th century, though widely versed in the Arabic-Malagasy tradition, he opted for literacy in Latin characters and invited the Protestants of the London Missionary Society to found schools and churches.

The current Malagasy orthography does not use all the letters of the Latin alphabet. Among the vowels, there are only four: a, e, i, o. The latter is pronounced like the "u" Castilian, while the letter "u" not used. The consonants "c", "q", "w" and "x".

Grammar

Malagasy is one of the few languages in the world in which sentences follow the order "verb - object - subject" (YOU).

Lexicon

Along with its Malayo-Polynesian lexical base, Malagasy has many words of Bantu origin, especially Swahili, due to immigration of speakers of these languages in past centuries, as well as trade contacts with the eastern coast from Africa. These business contacts are also the cause of the existence of many words of Arabic origin.

In contemporary times, the language has taken many words from French and, in recent years, also from English.

Sociolinguistic aspects

Geographic distribution

Malagasy is spoken throughout the island of Madagascar. On the island of Mayotte there are 39,000 speakers of the Bushi dialect. There are also small groups of speakers, in communities of Malagasy origin, on the island of Réunion and in the Comoros.

Officiality

Malagasy is co-official with French in Madagascar. Despite its status as a national language, French continues to be the main language in the elite print media.

Dialectology

There are different dialect classifications. A classification distinguishes eleven main Malagasy dialects, bushi, spoken in Mayotte, and another ten on the island of Madagascar: merina, spoken in the interior plateau, antankarana, bara, northern betsimisaraka, southern betsimisarana, masikoro, sakalava , tandroy-mahafaly, tanosy, and tsimihety.

In reality, the mutual intelligibility between the different dialect forms is restricted, so Malagasy can also be considered as a group of related languages, rather than as a single language. In this sense, the situation of Malagasy is similar to that of languages such as Chinese or Basque, considered as unique languages for reasons of cultural identity and geographical contiguity, despite the enormous differences shown by their "dialects".

Dialects of Malagasy can be grouped into two main areas: Eastern Malagasy, which includes Merina (the variety on which Standard Malagasy is based), and Western Malagasy, one of the main varieties of which is Sakalava. These two groups are separated by an isogloss that runs along the spine of the island, the south having western varieties and the central plateau and most of the north (leaving aside the extreme tip) having eastern varieties. Ethnologue distinguishes a dozen Malagasy varieties as different languages. They have a 70% lexical similarity with the Merino dialect on which the official language is based.

Regional Variations

The two main dialectal blocks (Eastern and Western) can be easily distinguished by numerous phonological features. Sakalava has lost the final consonants, while Merina has added a voiceless vowel [ə̥]:

• *tagilan 'mano'  sakalava [GRUNTS], merina [ Ringinging ]

The final *-t has become -[tse] in one dialect block and in -[ʈʂə̥] in the other:

• *kulit 'piel'  sakalava [crying], merina [......]

Sakalava retains the primordial sequences *li and *ti, while in Merina these gave rise to [di] (as in huditra 'piell' above) and [tsi]:

• *putiq 'blanco'  sakalava [^futi], merina [^futsi]

However, these latest changes began already in Borneo before the Malagasy arrived in Madagascar.