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Research
Malagasy is the language spoken in Madagascar by about 15 million people. Malagasy belongs to the Austronesian language family, which is a very large family that also includes: Hawaiian, Indonesian, and Maori (the language of New Zealand). The verb-object-subject (VOS) word order of Malagasy is unusual from a typological perspective as it is only found in approximately 5% of the world's languages. If English were verb-object-subject, instead of " She hired him," we would say "Hired him she". The language most closely related to Malagasy is Ma'anyan, spoken in South Borneo (Kalimantan, Indonesia). North American linguists became aware of Malagasy through the groundbreaking work of Ed Keenan who has been publishing papers on Malagasy since the 1970's. More recently there has been a renewed interest in Malagasy, due in part to its unusual word order and the implicataions for linguistics theory.
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