Semai language

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Semai
Spoken in	Peninsular Malaysia
Total speakers	33,000
Language family	Austro-Asiatic Nuclear Mon-Khmer Nico-Monic Asli-Monic Aslian Senoic Semai
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	mkh
ISO 639-3	sea
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Semai is an Austroasiatic language belonging to the Mon-Khmer subgroup, and it is spoken in Western Malaysia by about 33,000 speakers.

One notable aspect of Semai phonology is its highly irregular pattern of expressive reduplication, showing discontiguous copying from just the edges of the reduplicant's base, thus forming a minor syllable.

[edit] References

• Diffloth, Gerard. 1976a. Minor-Syllable Vocalism in Senoic Languages. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.), Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, 229-247. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
• Diffloth, Gerard. 1976b. Expressives in Semai. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.), Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, 249-264. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
• Hendricks, Sean. 2001. Bare-Consonant Reduplication Without Prosodic Templates: Expressive Reduplication in Semai. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 10: 287-306.

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