Malagasy language

Spoken in

• Austronesian Malayo -Polynesian Western Malayo -Polynesian Borneo Barito east Malagasy

Mg

Mlg

Mlg

Malagasy, Malgache or the Malagasy language is the westernmost language of the Austronesian family of languages ​​and French in addition to one of the official languages ​​in Madagascar. The most closely related language outside of Madagascar is the language of Ma'anyan from the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Tengah, in the south of the island of Borneo, which is nearly 7,000 miles from Madagascar. The Malagasy came along with immigrants from Southeast Asia to Madagascar. Different hypotheses, according to this migration took place either around 450 AD ( Dahl 1951) or in the 7th century AD ( Adelaar 1989).

Grammar

The language has five vowel phonemes. The emphasis is on the penultimate syllable, unless the word ends in ka, tra or na In this case it is stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. Elision occurs in unstressed syllables often.

The morphology is only konkatenativ ( " chaining ") and up to five at the verb grammar categories are expressed. Reduplication is a productive mechanism of word formation. In Malagasy there is no genus; the plural is not coded. There is a definite, but no indefinite article, ie if the item occurs, the indefinite noun phrase has meaning. The Malagasy knows (how many Austronesian languages) an all-inclusive exclusive distinction with the personal pronoun for "us": Isika (available), izahay (exclusive).

The word order in Malagasy is of type verb - object-subject ( VOS). The case marking follows the akkusativischen scheme ( as in German ).

Throughout its history, the Malagasy language has loanwords adopted from Bantu languages ​​(eg Swahili), Arabic, English and French.

Orthography

In the very regular orthography i will always like / i / spoken and written at the end of words than y. So y can only occur at the end of words (except proper names) and i just in the middle of words ( Exception: The word " i" article before proper names). o as / u / and j pronounced as / ts /. The s is like a German unvoiced / s /, the z is a voiced / s /. Unstressed vowels are often omitted ( elided ), so that olona "man" as [ uln ] is pronounced and Malagasy sounds in some dialects as his French transcription Malgache [ mal'gaʃ ] - in most dialects, the word but [ mala'gas (i)] pronounced.

The Malagasy alphabet consists of 21 Latin letters: A, B, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, V, Y, Z. It can be placed on the five vowels (A, e, I, O, Y ) nor accents ( grave accent ), show the stresses that deviate from the basic rules.