Malagasy Language - Orthography - Diacritics

Diacritics

Diacritics are not obligatory in standard Malagasy. They may however be used in the following ways:

• ` (grave accent) shows the stressed syllable in a word. It is frequently used for disambiguation. For instance in "tanàna" (town) and "tanana" (hand), where the word that is an exception to the usual pronunciation rules (tanàna) gets an accent. Using accent on the word that follows the pronunciation rules ("tànana") is less common, mainly in dictionaries. (This is very similar to the usage of the grave accent in Italian.)
• ´ (acute accent) may be used in
  • very old dictionaries, along with grave accent
  • dialects such as Bara
  • French (Tuléar) and French-spelled (Antsirabé) names. Malagasy versions are Toliara/Toliary and Antsirabe.
• ^ (circumflex) is used as follows:
  • ô shows that the letter is pronounced /o/ and not /u/, in malagasified foreign words (hôpitaly) and dialects (Tôlan̈aro). In standard Malagasy, "ao" or "oa" (as in "mivoaka") is used instead.
  • sometimes the single-letter words "a" and "e" are written "â" and "ê" but it does not change the pronunciation
• ¨ (trema) is used with n̈ in dialects for a velar nasal /ŋ/. Examples are place names such as Tôlan̈aro, Antsiran̈ana, Iharan̈a, Anantson̈o. This can be seen in maps from FTM, the national institute of geodesy and cartography.
• ~ (tilde) is used in ñ sometimes, perhaps when the writer cannot produce an n̈ (although ng is also used in such cases). In Ellis' Bara dialect dictionary, it is used for velar nasal /ŋ/ as well as palatal nasal /ɲ/.