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This article is about the Malagasy language. For the Malagasy ethnic group, see Malagasy people. For the residents or citizens of Madagascar, see Demographics of Madagascar

History

The Malagasy language is unrelated to nearby African languages, instead being 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 except for its Polynesian morphophonemics.¹ Malagasy shares much of its basic vocabulary with Ma'anyan language, a language from the region of the Barito River in southern Borneo. This indicates that Madagascar was first settled by Austronesian people from Island South-East Asia who had transited through Borneo, though it is not clear precisely when or why such colonisation took place. Later, the original Austronesian settlers must have mixed with East Africans and Arabs, amongst others.² The Malagasy language also includes borrowings a little part from Arabic, and Bantu languages (notably Swahili). The language has a written literature going back presumably to the 15th century. When the French established Fort-Dauphin in the 17th century, they found an arabico-malagasy script in use. The oldest known manuscript in that script is a short Malagasy-Dutch vocabulary from the early 17th century first published in 1908 by Gabriel Ferrand³ though the script must have been introduced into the South-East area of Madagascar in the 15th century.⁴ Radama I, the first literate representative of the Merina monarchy, though extensively versed in the arabico-malagasy tradition,⁵ opted for alphabetization in Latin characters and invited the Protestant London Missionary Society to establish schools and churches.

Malagasy has 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.

The first book to be printed in Malagasy is the Bible, which was translated into Malagasy in 1835 by British Christian missionaries⁶ working in the highlands area of Madagascar. The first bilingual renderings of religious texts are those by Etienne de Flacourt ⁷, who also published the first dictionary of the language.⁸

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

The alveolars /s z l/ are slightly palatalized. The velars /k g/ are palatalized after /i/ (e.g., alika /alikʲa/ 'dog').

Words are generally accented on the penultimate syllable, unless the word ends in ka, tra or na, in which case they are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. In many dialects, unstressed vowels (except /e/) are devoiced, and in some cases almost completely elided; thus fanorona is pronounced [fḁˈnornḁ].

Orthography

Malagasy has been written using the Latin alphabet since 1823, before which the Arabic Ajami script, or Sorabe ("large writings") as it is known in Madagascar, was used for astrological and magical texts.

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. The orthography maps rather straightforwardly to phonetics. The letters i and y both represent the /i/ sound (y is used word-finally, and i elsewhere), while o is pronounced /u/. The affricates /ʈʂ/ and /ɖʐ/ are written tr and dr, respectively, while /ts/ and /dz/ are written ts and j. The letter h is often silent. All other letters have essentially their IPA values.

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

Diacritics

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

Grammar

Word Order

Mamaky boky ny mpianatra
(reads book the student)
"The student is reading the book"

Nividy ronono ho an'ny zaza ny vehivavy
(bought milk for the child the woman)
"The woman bought milk for the child"

Within phrases, Malagasy order is typical of head initial languages: Malagasy has prepositions rather than postpositions (ho an'ny zaza "for the child"). Determiners precede the noun, while quantifiers, modifying adjective phrases, and relative clauses follow the noun (ny boky "the book(s)", ny boky mena "the red book(s)", ny boky rehetra "all the books", ny boky novakin'ny mpianatra "the book(s) that the student read").

Somewhat unusually, demonstrative determiners are repeated both before and after the noun ity boky ity "this book" (lit. "this book this").

Verbs

Verbs have syntactically three productive "voice" forms according to the thematic role they play in the sentence: the basic "agent focus" forms of the majority of Malagasy verbs, the derived "patient focus" forms used in "passive" constructions, and the derived "goal focus" forms used in constructions with focus on instrumentality. Thus

all mean "I wash my hands with soap" though focus is determined in each case by the sentence initial verb form and the sentence final (noun) argument: manasa "wash" and aho "I" in (1), sasako "wash" and ny tanako in (2), anasako "wash" and ny savony "soap" in (3). It should be noted that there is no equivalent to the English preposition with in (3).

Verbs inflect for past, present, and future tense, where tense is marked by prefixes (e.g., mividy "buy", nividy "bought", hividy "will buy").

Nouns, Pronouns, Locative Adverbials

Malagasy has no grammatical gender, and nouns do not inflect for number. However, pronouns and demonstratives have distinct singular and plural forms (cf. io boky io "that book", ireto boky ireto "these books").

There is a complex series of personal and demonstrative pronouns, depending on the speaker's familiarity and closeness to the referent.

Lexicography

The first dictionary of the language is Étienne de Flacourt's Dictionnaire de la langue de Madagascar published in 1658 though earlier glossaries written in arabico-malagasy script exist. A later 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.

Samples

The following samples are of the Imerina dialect (also known as "Official Malagasy"), spoken in the capital of Madagascar and in the central highlands or "plateau," home of the Imerina tribe.⁹ It is generally understood throughout the island.

References

^ Wittmann, Henri (1972). "Le caractère génétiquement composite des changements phonétiques du malgache." Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 7.807-10. La Haye: Mouton.[1]
^ Ferrand, Gabriel (1905). Les migrations musulmanes et juives à Madagascar. Paris: Revue de l'histoire des religions.
^ Ferrand, Gabriel (1908). "Un vocabulaire malgache-hollandais." Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië 61.673-677. The manuscript is now in the Arabico-Malagasy collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
^ Ferrand, Gabriel (1905). Les migrations musulmanes et juives à Madagascar. Paris: Revue de l'histoire des religions.
^ Berthier, H.J. (1934). De l'usage de l'arabico=malgache en Imérina au début du XIXe siècle: Le cahier d'écriture de Radama Ier. Tananarive.
^ The translation is due to David Griffith of the London Missionary Society, with corrections in 1865-1866.[2]
^ Flacourt, Étienne de (1657). Le Petit Catéchisme madécasse-français. Paris; (1661). Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar. Paris, pp. 197-202.
^ Flacourt, Étienne de (1658). Dictionnaire de la langue de Madagascar. Paris.
^ Rasoloson, Janie (2001). Malagasy-English/English-Malagasy: Dictionary and Phrasebook. Hippocrene Books.

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