Malagasy

Malagasy is the Austronesian, specifically Barito, language of Madagascar, and the westernmost member of its family: settlers from the Sunda Islands carried its ancestor across the Indian Ocean around the 400s. From about 1000 it absorbed Bantu and Arabic words brought by traders and new settlers, while Malay and Javanese loanwords recall the earliest sea links.

It is a dialect continuum spanning the island, including the Merina speech around Antananarivo. Its first writing was Sorabe, an Arabic-derived alphabet used in the southeast from the 1400s for astrological and magical texts, and in 1658 the Frenchman Etienne de Flacourt printed the first Malagasy dictionary.

In 1823 King Radama I adopted the Latin orthography of the missionary David Jones, under whom the London Missionary Society opened schools. The first Latin-printed Malagasy book, a Bible translation, followed in 1835.