What language do they speak in Madagascar?

Malagasy and French are Madagascar's official languages, and Malagasy is the national language. English isn't official and you shouldn't expect it everywhere. For visitors, French helps in towns, while an English-speaking guide matters most on a trip beyond them.

So on a trip you'll hear Malagasy all day and meet French in town, in offices and businesses. English you'll mostly need with the people looking after you, and on our trips that starts with your driver-guide, who speaks English. Before you come, you can plan the whole trip with Christian, who runs Tongasoa, in English, French or Spanish.

Malagasy: an Asian language off the coast of Africa

Madagascar sits off Africa, but its language came from the far side of the Indian Ocean. Malagasy is an Austronesian language with its roots in Indonesia, and its closest living relative is Ma'anyan, spoken along the Barito river in the south-east of Borneo. The Norwegian missionary and linguist Otto Christian Dahl set out that link in 1951, and later work has only firmed it up. The relationship is linguistic, rather than a claim that everyone in Madagascar has the same ancestry.

Genetics points the same way. A 2012 study (Cox et al.) suggests the island was settled about 1,200 years ago by a small founding group that included about 30 women, most of them of Indonesian descent. The tie to Borneo is in the words more than the blood, though: a 2015 study found the Ma'anyan themselves have only subtle genetic connections to the Malagasy.

Other words came later, with the people who sailed in. Arab and Persian traders were reaching the island by the 7th century, and migrants from Africa arrived around AD 1000. The older borrowings seem to come from Swahili and its forerunners, and the everyday hello, salama, is the Arabic salam. French and English words followed much later. Sekoly, school, is borrowed from English.

The alphabet dates from the 1820s. In 1823 King Radama I settled on Latin letters instead of the Arabic characters that had been used to write Malagasy before, and David Jones of the London Missionary Society worked out the spelling. Most of the Malagasy Bible the society printed in 1835 was the work of Jones and his colleague David Griffiths. The spelling doesn't tell you everything, though: the stress usually isn't marked, and the ends of words get swallowed. More on that below.

Dialects, and the Malagasy in the phrasebooks

Malagasy changes as you travel. Two researchers at the University of L'Aquila, who compared 60 word lists from around the island, describe it as "a constellation of dialects", in two broad families: one in the south-west, the other across the centre, north and east. Ethnologue counts about a dozen main varieties.

The official standard grew out of Merina, the dialect of the highlands around Antananarivo, and it's the Malagasy you'll find in phrasebooks and in the list below. Elsewhere you'll hear the same words said differently. In the north, for instance, the letter o is usually a plain "o", where the highlands say "oo".

English: official for three years, and still rare

In April 2007 voters approved a set of changes to the constitution that, among other things, made English a third official language. About 75 per cent voted yes. It didn't last: the new constitution of 2010 lists only Malagasy and French.

Don't plan an independent trip on the assumption that everyone speaks English. The US trade guide is blunt about it. English is rarely spoken, and outside the capital and the major towns you shouldn't expect even minimal English from ordinary people or officials. You'll find it most easily where visitors go, in hotels and lodges that see foreign guests and in Antananarivo. In villages and small market towns, plan on none.

What it means on a trip with us

Every one of our trips runs with your own vehicle and English-speaking driver-guide. In villages where English runs out, they do the talking, in Malagasy or French. Inside the national parks you also walk with a local park guide, because Madagascar National Parks makes one compulsory on every visit.

Planning works in three languages. Christian speaks French, Spanish and English, so you can shape the route and the pace with him in whichever suits you, on WhatsApp if you like. Messages land with the small team in Antananarivo who will actually run your trip.

A few words of Malagasy still change how a day goes. Rough Guides advises greeting people with manao ahoana and asking how they are before you ask for anything, especially in villages and small towns, because going straight to a request can come across as rude. The greeting and thank you take ten minutes to learn on the flight. Our travel tips cover the rest of what first-timers ask, from cash to fady, the local taboos.

How Malagasy is pronounced

• Vowels. Malagasy has four vowel sounds, written a, e, i and o, and in the standard the o sounds like the "oo" in pool. So veloma is "ve-LOOM", not "ve-LOH-ma". I and y are the same sound: y simply goes at the end of a word.
• Stress. Most words are stressed on the second-to-last syllable. Words ending in -ka, -tra or -na usually take it one syllable earlier. It matters: tanàna, stressed on the middle syllable, is a town, and tanana, stressed on the first, is a hand. Get it wrong and you've asked the way to the nearest hand.
• Swallowed endings. Syllables after the stress are said lightly, and unstressed ones can drop out altogether. Lonely Planet's phrasebook writes misaotra as "mi-sotr". It's why long place names come out shorter than they look.

Place names visitors get wrong

Long names get easier once you see the words inside them. Ranomafana is rano mafana, "hot water". Nosy Be is "big island", Antsirabe means "where there is much salt", and tsingy, as in the Tsingy de Bemaraha, means "where one cannot walk barefoot".

• Antananarivo (an-ta-na-na-REEV). The capital, "the city of the thousand". The stress falls on ri and the final o is barely there. The French called it Tananarive, and the short form you'll hear, Tana, dates from then.
• Toamasina (toh-MASS-in). The east coast port, Tamatave in French. The oa slides into one sound, and the stress falls on ma.
• Ranomafana (ra-noo-ma-FAN). Two words run together, and the stress comes from the second, mafana. More in our Ranomafana guide.
• Antsirabe (ant-si-ra-BAY). One that breaks the pattern, with the stress on the last syllable, be. See our Antsirabe guide.
• Ambositra (am-BOOSH-tr). It ends in -tra, so the stress moves back to bo, and the i after it all but vanishes.
• Toliara (too-lee-AR). Tulear in French, at the end of the RN7. The stress falls on the a, not the i.

Both of the trips below give you plenty of practice. The Classic South runs down the RN7 through Antsirabe, Ambositra, Ranomafana, Fianarantsoa and Ambalavao before the reef at Ifaty. The Eastern trip goes from Andasibe to Ankanin'ny Nofy ("nest for dreams") on the Pangalanes canal, then by boat to Toamasina on the way to Sainte-Marie. Send your dates on the booking page, in English, French or Spanish, and a real person in Antananarivo replies, usually within 24 hours.

Photos: Sandy Ravaloniaina and Sitraka on Unsplash.