“To be or not to be, that is the question”—at least in English it is. In Malagasy, however, not so much since, while there is a verb for ‘to be’ it’s almost never said, but simply implied. When I questioned Robert, the Malagasy training manager, about this I was met with a mischievous grin and an enigmatic statement: “What is ‘to be,’ anyway?” To which I replied: “Well yeah, isn’t that the question?”

 

In this post I want to talk about the hurdles I’ve encountered while attempting to learn not only official Malagasy, but also a variant patois of it called ‘Tsimihety,’ which is spoken in my region—Sofia. I’m going to talk briefly about the Peace Corps philosophy about language and community integration, describe the rudiments of the language’s structure, discuss the dearth of language resources in Madagascar, and finally touch on the strong oral tradition found here in Madagascar.

 

Language training in the Peace Corps begins in the classroom, with daily four-hour sessions that incorporate rudimentary vocabulary and basic dialogues that get progressively harder—SOP as far as language learning is concerned. However, the classroom is only where the plowing is done. The real planting in is done on the home-front through one’s daily interactions with one’s host family members, interactions that not only employ one immediately with survival vocabulary, such as ‘spoon’ and ‘eat’ and ‘I really don’t eat meat,’ but also create constant opportunities to put into practice the material learned in the classroom.

 

In this regard I was particularly fortunate to have a peer to converse with. Josef, my twenty-one-year-old Malagasy brother, and I would pretty much sit down daily with dictionaries and notebooks and just talk about whatever came to mind for a few hours over delicious coffee and peanut butter—I’m already nostalgic. Our conversations helped me to progress my language skills quickly and before long Josef could explain words in Malagasy to me instead of having to ask a teacher the next day during class.

 

Peace Corps encourages its volunteers to learn local dialects in order to garner support and respect from native inhabitants. For the first two weeks of training, all volunteers in Madagascar study the common speech, that is, the speech spoken by the people in the capital city, Antananarivo. Once we found out our sites, however, volunteers were segregated by region in order to begin learning their regions’ respective dialects. In Sofia, the region where myself and three others are stationed, they speak a variation of the standard speech known as “Tsimihety.” Literally translated “Tsimihety” means “those who do not cut their hair,” and it is both the name of the region’s language and tribal ancestors who, in honor of a fallen king, forbore from cutting their hair.

 

If you think learning Malagasy is difficult, try learning a variation of Malagasy spoken only in a small region of the country. I’m not even talking about linguistic difficulty here. Indeed, it’s fairly easy to gain a rudimentary grasp of the Malagasy language. With regard to temporal tenses, for example, there are only three ways to convey the time at which a verb is occurring: past, present, and future. To change the tense of the verb, simply change the first letter of the verb. Past tense is denoted by verbs beginning in ‘N,’ present tense by those beginning with ‘M,’ and future tense by an ‘H.’ Take, for instance, the verb ‘mianatra,’ which means ‘to study.’ Following the scheme just outline, to denote the past tense ‘mianatra,’ the present tense form of the verb, becomes ‘nianatra,’ while to denote the future tense it would become ‘hianatra.’ Obviously it gets more complex than that as you venture into things like the passive tense, but you can see how one could easily and quickly gain functional and even conversational fluency.

 

But I’m getting carried away here—the difficulty I really want to describe here is the difficulty of finding resources with which to study with. Walk into a bookstore in America and you will find a department devoted to selling you whatever resources you need to study whatever foreign language you want to learn. You don’t like books? Buy Rosetta Stone. Don’t have a computer? Put these tracks on your ipod. Walk into a bookstore in China and you’ll find an entire department devoted to selling you the latest and most effective ways of studying English. Choose from a plethora of textbooks, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and maybe even a seminar or two with ‘Crazy English.’ Walk into a store—I have yet to find a bookstore—here in Madagascar and try finding a Malagasy dictionary. That’s right—there is no official Malagasy dictionary.

 

Let that sink in for a moment—no dictionary.

 

Well there is one dictionary. It’s this flimsy little pink booklet that missionaries compiled years ago. And of course there is the yellow one on Amazon.com available for purchase, but word on the dirt road is that the pink one, which is not even a centimeter thick, is better.

 

In China I bought the newspaper everyday, sat down with my electronic dictionary, and cranked out a few articles no matter how hard they were. In Madagascar there are neither Malagasy dictionaries nor Malagasy textbooks. In Befandriana-Nord, the town where I reside, there aren’t even newspapers. In Antananarivo, the capital, where there are at least newspapers, most articles are in French—such is their legacy. No dictionaries, no textbooks, no newspapers—for official Malagasy, the common speech. Now imagine the situation for Tsimihety, my dialect. Needless to say, the tiny notebooks fill up fast.

 

The Peace Corps language training staff has worked hard to create a textbook suitable for learning the rudiments of the language. And it’s a good textbook filled with all sorts of useful dialogues and vocabulary and cheesy pictures and clipart from Word ‘97—but, it can only take you so far for two reasons. First, they only contain two months worth of information, which is enough to get you off the ground, but if you’re aiming for the stratosphere it’s going to take a lot more than that. Second, try sitting the staff down to get into the real nuts and bolts of the language and sometimes you’re just met with stares. They’ve come up with all these silly pseudo-grammatical terms like ‘substantive’ and ‘relative’ to describe verb transformations, but I could never get anyone to tell me when exactly to use them! Recently I asked a colleague, Honore (see below), the Malagasy teacher, if there were any famous Malagasy writers.

 

     “Yes,” he said, “Jean-Simone (I think).”

     “What did he write?” (Meaning, like, book)

     “He standardized Malagasy about fifty years ago.”

     (Astounded) “Any fiction writers?”

     (Honore looks at colleague) “Do we have any fiction writers? No? Nope. All French books.”

 

The point of recounting this interaction is threefold. First, Malagasy, at least in its ‘official’ form is a young language. It’s only been standardized for less than a century. Second, French colonization, as one might expect, has had its way with this country and this country’s culture. Linguistically, anything and everything official is usually in French and numbers too to boot (the woes and headaches of communicating in French numbers and the arcane financial system here shall be recounted in great detail in the future). Finally, modern Madagascar is heir to a very strong oral culture. Here the spoken word trumps the written word. In my region, for example, degree is expressed by differently intoning the voice. A low pitch for something big—’GEEEEEDDDAAAA;’ a high pitch for something small—’kkkkkkkeeeeellllllyy.’ Furthermore, the Malagasy are a breed who love to give speeches on even the smallest of occasions. It’s not uncommon for me to be at a staff meeting and to hear the all-to-familiar and by now ominous, “Tompokolahy sy tompokovavy”—”gentlemen and ladies,” which is, without exception, proceeded by a long and windbagg-y thank you to every who is at the meeting and a small speech about the desks that are broken. Another example that I find to be revealing is the Malagasy word for history “tantara,” which stems from the verb “mitantara,” meaning ‘to tell,’ which, in this writer’s humble opinion, is a marked improvement on its English counterpart.