Malagasy is the national language of Madagascar, sharing official status with French, and is spoken by around 25 million people. Strikingly, it is not African in origin: Malagasy belongs to the Austronesian family, and its closest relatives are languages of southern Borneo, several thousand miles away across the Indian Ocean, evidence of the seafaring migrations that first settled the island over a thousand years ago. Later contact added loanwords from Bantu languages, Arabic and French. The standard written form is based on Merina, the dialect of the central highlands around Antananarivo, and uses the Latin alphabet, adopted in the 1820s; before that, some texts were written in Sorabe, an Arabic-based script. Coastal dialects differ noticeably from highland speech, though speakers around the island generally understand one another.
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