Malagasy is an Austronesian language and the national language of Madagascar. There are 25 million native speakers of Malagasy; most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language, as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere
Verbs have syntactically three productive "voice" forms according to the thematic role they play in the sentence: active, passive, and relative. Verbs inflect for past, present, and future tense.