Malagasy.info

Malagasy.info is MADDev's own venture, not a client commission: an English-language reference and culture site about Madagascar, currently in development. Its flagship feature is a very large Malagasy-language dictionary, alongside further planned content covering the country's people, history, culture and current affairs.

The intended audience is English-speaking readers who want to understand, visit, work with or move to Madagascar. Much of Madagascar's existing web presence, including news, reference material, tourism information and official material, is French-language, leaving that audience underserved.

Status

In development, not yet public

Platform

Drupal 11, with a fork of MADDev's shared maddev_bootstrap theme

Audience

English-speaking readers wanting to understand, visit, work with or move to Madagascar

Flagship feature

A Malagasy-language dictionary of over 100,000 entries, in development

Planned content pillars

Language, people, history, culture, magazine and news, plus a travel section

• A generic, reusable dictionary engine, not tied to any one language: each entry carries a headword, dialect and language-term references, glosses, part of speech and cross-referenced equivalent terms, with its own source and licence recorded per entry
• A quick-add form for entering new entries by hand, alongside the bulk import pipeline
• A review workflow: every imported entry starts unverified and is checked by hand before being confirmed
• A searchable dictionary page (/dictionary) with custom filters, including a way to browse root words separately from the forms derived from them, reflecting Malagasy's agglutinative grammar

The dictionary is the site's flagship feature: over 100,000 entries, with development ongoing. A count on the development database recorded 105,961 entries, including 40,900 links connecting derived word forms back to 5,879 distinct roots, and around 8,800 cross-referenced equivalent terms.

Every entry traces to a named source, never to machine translation: kaikki.org's Malagasy extract of English Wiktionary, and motmalgache.org's Rakibolana dictionary, harvested with the maintainer's permission. Older English glosses draw on historical public-domain dictionaries. 29 regional dialects and varieties are tagged throughout, among them Vezo, Sakalava, Betsimisaraka, Betsileo and Merina, reflecting Madagascar's dialect diversity rather than a single register.

The Rakibolana's own index lists about 105,000 headwords, while the first harvest had worked through the 29 dialect word lists and a seed set, never the full alphabetical index. Rather than crawl everything again, a check that read the source's index pages took about two minutes and 76 requests, and showed the harvest then held about 36% of the source dictionary. The harvest continues, and the same check measures its coverage each time.