Malagasy Alphabet & Special Characters

The Malagasy alphabet is A B D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T V Y Z, capital and small, in that order. Five letters of the English alphabet are missing: there is no c, q, u, w or x. Where other languages write c or q, Malagasy writes k (kafe, coffee), and the oo sound that English might spell with u is written o. Those letters also occur in some foreign loanwords.

Malagasy has been written in the Latin alphabet since the 1820s, when King Radama I worked with Welsh missionaries of the London Missionary Society on a spelling for the language; the well-known account is that the consonants were given their English values and the vowels their French ones, which is why o reads like the oo of "food". The first complete Malagasy Bible followed in the 1830s. Long before that, scholars of the southeast, above all among the Antemoro, wrote Malagasy in Arabic letters, a script called sorabe ("big writing") that survives in old manuscripts.

Accented letters are not counted as separate letters and sort with their plain letter in dictionaries, so à sits among the a's and ô among the o's.

Malagasy alphabet pronunciation: o, j, y and the letter pairs

Most letters sound much as an English speaker expects, with a few rules that explain nearly every Malagasy word. Plain o is the oo of "food": omby (zebu) is said "oom-bee" and tsara (good) "tsah-ra". j is a dz sound, as in jiro, lamp. g is always hard, as in "go", and s always as in "see".

i and y are the same vowel, the ee of "see". The spelling rule is simple: at the end of a word you write y, everywhere else i. So the language is Malagasy, "not" is tsy, and "thank you" is misaotra with an i inside the word. That y rule is the reason the letter list ends with Y and Z but has no U.

The pairs tr, dr and ts are each pronounced as one sound, and nasal pairs like mb, mp, nd, nt and ng are said together, as in omby. Stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable, and the final vowel after it is often so light it is nearly silent, which is why Malagasy sounds close to "mala-gash" and Antananarivo to "antana-nareev". Words ending in -ka, -tra and -na usually take the stress one syllable earlier.

Malagasy accents: the grave accent and ô

Malagasy uses accents sparingly, and most everyday writing leaves them out. The grave accent marks the stressed syllable when the normal rule would mislead the reader or when two words would otherwise look the same. The textbook pair is tanàna (town), stressed on the middle syllable, against tànana (hand), stressed on the first. The mark can go on any vowel, which gives à è ì ò and, for a stressed y at the end of a word, ỳ, an unusual one that few keyboards have a key for. Dictionaries, schoolbooks and careful texts use the grave accents most.

The circumflex appears chiefly on ô; â and ê also occur in some one-letter words. Because plain o already means the oo sound, ô is there to write a real o, as in French mot, in a few words and in many borrowings and names. Leaving it off can change how a word is read.

Some regional varieties of the north and west write an extra nasal sound, the ng of "sing", with ñ or n̈, as in Antsirañana, the local spelling of the northern port city of Antsiranana. That letter belongs to dialect writing rather than to the official alphabet, so it is not in the grid; copy ñ from here if you need it.

How to type Malagasy accents on a keyboard and phone

Keyboards in Madagascar often follow the French AZERTY layout, which has its own keys for à and è; ô is typed with the ^ dead key followed by o. On a US keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: Alt+0224 à, Alt+0192 À, Alt+0232 è, Alt+0200 È, Alt+0236 ì, Alt+0204 Ì, Alt+0242 ò, Alt+0210 Ò, Alt+0244 ô, Alt+0212 Ô, Alt+0171 «, Alt+0187 » and Alt+0146 ’. The US-International layout also works: press ` then the vowel for the grave accent and ^ then o for ô. ỳ and Ỳ have no Alt code: in Word type 1EF3 (or 1EF2 for the capital) and press Alt+X, or copy them from the grid.

On a Mac, press Option+` and then the vowel for à è ì ò, and Option+I and then o for ô; Option+\ types « and Option+Shift+\ types ». For ỳ, use the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) or copy it from this page. On iPhone and Android, hold down a, e, i or o and slide to the accented letter; if holding y does not offer ỳ, copy it from the grid. In HTML the entities are à, è, ì, ò, ô, ỳ for ỳ, and « » for « ».

The apostrophe and quotation marks in Malagasy

The apostrophe is everywhere in Malagasy, because a word linked to the one after it, the way English uses "of", takes an n and an apostrophe: fety (festival) becomes Fetin'ny Fahaleovantena, the festival of independence, Independence Day, and an'i comes before people's names, as in an'i Rabe, Rabe's. In printed text the apostrophe is the curly ’, in quick typing the straight '.

Malagasy writing often follows French custom and quotes with guillemets, « like this », while much writing online uses the curly “ ” of English.

Where Malagasy is spoken

Malagasy is the language of Madagascar, spoken by an estimated 26.5 million people (CLDR estimate), nearly the whole population, and it is an official language there together with French. The standard written language is based on the Merina speech of the central highlands around Antananarivo; the coastal regions have their own varieties, such as Betsimisaraka, Sakalava and Antandroy, and dialects of Malagasy are also spoken on Mayotte. There are large Malagasy communities in France and on Réunion.

Malagasy is an Austronesian language, and its closest relatives are spoken in southern Borneo, thousands of kilometres east across the Indian Ocean. That makes it a distant cousin of Malay, Indonesian and Filipino rather than of the African languages around it: Malagasy dimy (five) matches Malay and Indonesian lima, and fito (seven) matches Filipino pito. The French collection has the letters for Madagascar's other official language, and the Madagascar collection has the flag 🇲🇬, the zebu, the lemur stand-ins and the rest of the island's emoji.