Malagasy is the westernmost member of the Austronesian language family, spoken on Madagascar where it is an official language. It has the highly unusual Verb Object Subject constituent order .

The orthography is comparable to English. 'i' is always pronounced 'ee', and it is written as 'y' at the end of a word. 'o' is pronounced 'oo'. Words are accented on the penult, unless the word ends in "ka", "tra", or "na", in which case it is accented on the antepenult. Unstressed vowels are often elided; thus fanorona is pronounced "fanoorn" and Malagasy sounds like its French transliteration "Malgache".

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.

Ô-Circumflex and n-diaeresis are occasionally used, for instance in place names such as Tôlan̈aro, Antsiran̈ana, Iharan̈a, Anantson̈o. This can be seen in in maps from FTM, the national institute of geodesy and cartography. Alternative spellings and pronounciations such as "Taolagnaro" exist.

Dictionaries

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

• Richardson: A New Malagasy-English Dictionary. Farnborough, England: Gregg Press 1967, 892 p. ISBN 0576116076
• 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.

External Links

• Ethnologue report for Malagasy
• Malagasy - English Dictionary