Malagasy language

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 typology.

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".

External Link: Ethnologue report for Malagasy