Tukang Besi language
Appearance
Tukang Besi | |
---|---|
Native to | Indonesia |
Region | Sulawesi, Tukang Besi Archipelago |
Native speakers | (250,000 cited 1995)[1] |
Austronesian
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | Either:khc – Tukang Besi Northbhq – Tukang Besi South |
Glottolog | tuka1247 |
Tukang Besi is an Austronesian language spoken in the Tukangbesi Islands in southeast Sulawesi in Indonesia by a quarter million speakers.
Phonology
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Tukang_Besi_vowel_chart.svg/220px-Tukang_Besi_vowel_chart.svg.png)
The northern dialect of Tukang Besi has 25 consonant phonemes and a basic 5-vowel system.[2] It features stress which is usually on the second-to-last syllable. The language has two implosive consonants, which are uncommon in the world's languages. The coronal plosives and /s/ have prenasalized counterparts which act as separate phonemes.
Bilabial | Dental/ Alveolar |
Velar | Glottal | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||||
Plosive | plain | p | b | t̪ | (d̪) | k | ɡ | ʔ |
prenasalized | mp | mb | n̪t̪ | n̪d̪ | ŋk | ŋɡ | ||
Implosive | ɓ | ɗ̪ | ||||||
Fricative | plain | β | s | (z) | h | |||
prenasalized | n̪s̪ | |||||||
Trill | r | |||||||
Lateral | l̪ |
/b/ only appears in loanwords, but it contrasts with /ɓ/. [d] and [z] are not phonemic and appear only as allophones of /dʒ/ which appears only in loanwords.
References
- ^ Tukang Besi North at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Tukang Besi South at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required) - ^ Donohue, Mark (1999). "Tukang Besi". Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press. pp. 151–53. ISBN 0-521-65236-7.