Marofotsy dialect

Marofotsy
Native to	Madagascar
Ethnicity	Marofotsy
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Western Indonesian Barito East Barito Central-Eastern Malagasic Plateau Malagasy Marofotsy
Writing system	Latin script (Malagasy alphabet)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	mg
ISO 639-3	plt

Marofotsy dialect is a Malagasy dialect spoken mainly by malagasy tribe of the same name. ^[1]

Location

Marofotsy is spoken in the district of Tsaratanana in the region of Betsiboka. ^[2]

Classification

The Marofotsy dialect belongs to the Plateaux Malagasy group, together with Sihanaka, Merina, Antaifasy, and Antambahoaka.

Characteristics

Marofotsy is a transitional dialect between the Northern Sakalava dialect (more precisely the Boina variety) and the Merina dialect. It retains several Merina features such as the suffixes -ka, -tra, and -na, ^[3] while also showing influence from Northern Sakalava. For example, fitaovanandreo (“their tools”) corresponds to fitaovan’ireo in Merina.

Although the vocabulary is largely similar to that of Merina, Marofotsy differs in its sentence structure and pronoun usage. For instance, ankoatrizay in Merina becomes ny ankoatrany in Marofotsy, notafin’ireo (“they attacked”) becomes noravandreo, and naverin’ireo (“they returned”) becomes naverinandreo.

The use of the ending -ndreo instead of -ireo is a characteristic feature shared with Boina Sakalava.

References

1. Turcotte, Denis (1981). La politique linguistique en Afrique francophone: une étude comparative de la Côte d'Ivoire et de Madagascar (in French). Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. p. 53.
2. Molet, Louis (1957). Petit guide de toponymie malgache (PDF) (in French). Tananarive: Scientific Research Institute of Madagascar, Department of Human Sciences. pp. map (unnumbered) + p. 7. The map is placed before the numbered pages.
3. McElroy, Colleen J. (1999). Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar. University of Washington Press. p. xxiv.