ABSTRACT
Malagasy is spoken by around 12 million people in Madagascar (of which it is the official language), the Comoros Islands, the Seychelles, Réunion and Mayotte. Despite its geographical proximity to Africa, it is a Western Austronesian outlier, and is thought to have been brought across the Indian Ocean perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 years ago from the region of Borneo, exhibiting as it does affinities with the Indonesian group of languages in that area. Malagasy has several mutually intelligible dialects; the standard language is based on the dominant Merina dialect of the central plateau, which includes the capital Antananarivo.
