Shimaore, one of the languages, is spoken on the disputed island of Mayotte, a French department claimed by Comoros.

In 2009 the current independent government decreed a modified version of the Latin script for official use.

[citation needed] Recently, some scholars have suggested that the language may be on its way to endangerment, citing the unstable code-switching and numerous French words used in daily speech.

On July 3, 1613, Walter Payton claimed to have recorded 14 words on the island of Moheli, stating "They speak a kind of Morisco language."

[10] The dialect was noted again in 1841 by Casalis, who placed it within Bantu, and by Peters, who collected a short word list.

He discusses Shinzwani and Swahili as two separate languages which had contributed to the port-language which he referred to as Barracoon.

[14] Shingazija was not documented until 1869 when Bishop Edward Steere collected a word list and commented that he did not know which language family it belonged to.

In the Shimaore dialect, if when inserting a prefix the leading consonant becomes intervocalic, [p] becomes [β], [ɗ] becomes [l], [ʈ] becomes [r], [k] becomes [h], and [ɓ] is deleted.

There was previously a tone system in the language, but it has been mostly phased out and no longer plays an active role in the majority of cases.

Since independence from France, the situation has changed, with improvements to infrastructure of secular education, in which French is the language of instruction.

Comoros being located near the East African coast, the archipelago being connected by deep trade links to the mainland, and Comorian being a Bantu language much like Swahili language, means that historically, the Arabic orthography of Comorian followed the Swahili suit in being part of the tradition of the African Ajami script.

Key components of the Ajami tradition are mainly that vowels were always represented with diacritics (thus differing from Persian conventions).

The letters alif ا‎, wāw و‎, and yāʼ ي‎ were used for indicating stressed syllable or long vowels.

[1] The 20th century marked the start of a process of orthographic reform and standardization across the Muslim world.

This process included standardizing, unifying, and clarifying the Arabic script in most places, ditching the Arabic script in favour of Latin or Cyrillic in others in places such as Soviet Turkistan and Soviet Caucasus, to Turkey and Kurdistan, to the Eastern African coast (Swahili Ajami) and Comoros.

The mantle of standardization and improvement of Arabic-based orthography in Comoros was carried by the literaturist Said Kamar-Eddine (1890-1974) in 1960.

[18][1] But, in the proposal by Said Kamar-Eddine for Comorian, there was a departure from the Ajami tradition and a divergence from what was done by Swahili literaturists.

This makes Said Kamar-Eddine orthography for Comorian, a unique case for Sub-saharan African languages that have been written with the Arabic script.

In the early 20th century, West and East Circassian Arabic orthography also used this variant of the letter hāʾ to represent the vowel [ə] (written as ы in Cyrillic).

First method is similar to Persian and Kurdish, where new letters are created by adding or modifying of dots.

The second method is to use the Arabic gemination diacritic Shaddah on letters that are most similar to the missing consonant phoneme.

Classes 9 & 10 consists mainly of borrowed words, such as dipe (from French du pain 'some bread') and do not take prefixes.

[8] gari5.carl-a5-GENSufaSufagari l-a Sufa5.car 5-GEN SufaSufa's carComorian languages exhibit a typical Bantu verb structure.