Malagasy :

Malagasy is the national language of Madagascar, a member of the Austronesian family of languages. Most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere.

The Malagasy language is not related 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 Southeast Barito group of languages spoken in Borneo except for its Polynesian morphophonemics. Malagasy shares much of its basic vocabulary with the 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 the Malay Archipelago 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.

The Malagasy language also includes some borrowings 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, known as Sorabe. The oldest known manuscript in that script is a short Malagasy-Dutch vocabulary from the early 17th century first published in 1908 by Gabriel Ferrand though the script must have been introduced into the southeast area of Madagascar in the 15th century. Radama I, the first literate representative of the Merina monarchy, though extensively versed in the Arabico-Malagasy tradition, 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 was the Bible, which was translated into Malagasy in 1835 by British Christian missionaries working in the highlands area of Madagascar. The first bilingual renderings of religious texts are those by Étienne de Flacourt , who also published the first dictionary of the language.

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