Mahorian, known locally as Shimaore, is the variety of Comorian spoken on Mayotte, the Indian Ocean island that is a French overseas department. Comorian is a Bantu language related to Swahili, with heavy borrowing from Arabic that reflects centuries of trade and Islam across the region. Shimaore is the everyday language of a majority on Mayotte, spoken alongside Kibushi, a Malagasy dialect used in some villages, and French, the sole official language and the language of school and administration. Speaker numbers are in the low hundreds of thousands. Shimaore is written in the Latin alphabet today, and the Arabic script has also been used traditionally. Because Mayotte is part of France, many Shimaore speakers move to metropolitan France, and the language travels with them.
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