Concept

Malagasy language

Overview

Malagasy ( MAL-ə-GASS-ee; Malagasy pronunciation: [malaˈɡasʲ]; Sorabe: مَلَغَسِ) is an Austronesian language and dialect continuum spoken in Madagascar. The standard variety, called Official Malagasy, is one of the official languages of Madagascar, alongside French.

Malagasy is the westernmost Austronesian language, brought to Madagascar with the settlement of Austronesian speakers from the Sunda Islands (about 7,300 kilometres or 4,500 miles away) around the 5th century AD or perhaps between the 7th and 13th centuries. The Malagasy language is one of the Barito languages and is most closely related to the Maʼanyan language, still spoken on Borneo. Malagasy also includes numerous Malay loanwords from the time of the early Austronesian settlement and trading between Madagascar and the Sunda Islands. After c. 1000 AD, Malagasy incorporated numerous Bantu and Arabic loanwords brought over by traders and new settlers.

Malagasy is spoken by around 25 million people in Madagascar and the Comoros. Most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language, as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere. Malagasy is divided in dozen dialects between three main dialect groups: Northern Malagasic, Central-Eastern Malagasic and Southern Malagasic. The central plateau of the island, where the capital Antananarivo and the old heartland of the Merina Kingdom is located, speaks the Merina dialect. The Merina dialect is the basis of Standard Malagasy, which is used by the government and media in Madagascar. Standard Malagasy is one of two official languages of Madagascar alongside French, in the 2010 constitution of the Fourth Republic of Madagascar.

Malagasy is written in the Latin script, which was introduced by Western missionaries in the early 19th century. Previously, the Sorabe script was used, a local development of the Arabic script.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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The use of our own language has led us to neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. Let us study children and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Malagasy language is.
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This is indicated primarily by the fact that these languages lack what we would call grammatical categories. As regards this point, Westermann's grammar of the Ewe language is in entire agreement with the much earlier results which Steinthal reached in his investigation of the Manda language, which is also of the Soudan region. These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Malagasy language is.
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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Malagasy language is.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Language.

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