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.
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.
[citation needed] Although French remains the official language in Mayotte, Shimaore will probably be taught in Mahoran schools starting in the next few years,[when?]
[citation needed] Shimaore's position in this regard is however different from other French regions (such as Brittany), since the language is locally spoken by a majority of the population.
Mayotte is a geographically small territory, but frequent exchanges between villages only began in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
[5] On 3 March 2020, the Conseil départemental de Mayotte announced the adoption of official orthographies in both Latin and Arabic scripts for Shimaore.
Whereas in Arabic, the letter ʿayn is used as a pharyngeal consonant, in Maore it has a unique role of being the carrier for nasal vowels.
When non-nasal vowels are at the beginning of a word, alif-hamza "أ / إ" is used as a carrier of the appropriate diacritic (followed by the letter waw "و" and ya' "ي" as needed.)