Maore Comorian, or ''Shimaore'' (
French ''Mahorais''), is one of the two indigenous languages spoken in the
French-ruled
Comorian islands of
Mayotte
Mayotte (; french: Mayotte, ; Shimaore language, Shimaore: ''Maore'', ; Bushi language, Kibushi: ''Maori'', ), officially the Department of Mayotte (french: Département de Mayotte), is an Overseas France, overseas Overseas departments and regi ...
; Shimaore being a dialect of the
Comorian language
Comorian (''Shikomori'', or ''Shimasiwa'', the "language of islands") is the name given to a group of four Bantu languages spoken in the Comoro Islands, an archipelago in the southwestern Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar. It is name ...
, while
ShiBushi is an unrelated
Malayo-Polynesian language
The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...
originally from
Madagascar
Madagascar (; mg, Madagasikara, ), officially the Republic of Madagascar ( mg, Repoblikan'i Madagasikara, links=no, ; french: République de Madagascar), is an island country in the Indian Ocean, approximately off the coast of East Africa ...
. Historically, Shimaore- and ShiBushi-speaking villages on Mayotte have been clearly identified, but Shimaore tends to be the ''de facto'' indigenous ''
lingua franca'' in everyday life, because of the larger Shimaore-speaking population. Only Shimaore is represented on the local television news program by
Mayotte La Première. The 2002 census references 80,140 speakers of Shimaore in Mayotte itself, to which one would have to add people living outside the island, mostly in metropolitan France. There are also 20,000 speakers of Comorian in Madagascar, of which 3,000 are Shimaore speakers.
The same 2002 census indicates that 37,840 persons responded as knowing how to read or write Shimaore. However this number has to be taken with caution, since it was a few years after this census was taken that a standard writing system was introduced.
From a
sociolinguistic
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...
perspective,