Balantak is an
Austronesian language spoken at the head of the eastern peninsula of
Sulawesi
Sulawesi (), also known as Celebes (), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Ar ...
. It is classified as a member of the
Saluan-Banggai branch of the
Celebic subgroup. The Balantak language is the primary language of the Balantak people. Although 90% of the population are also proficient in
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
, the vernacular is still vigorously used in everyday contexts, and most children only speak Balantak before entering school.
Phonology
Balantak has the following phoneme inventory:
Sequences of like vowels are phonetically realized as long vowels, e.g. ''toop''
ɔ:p'cigarette', ''nuur''
u:r'coconut'.
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
"Balantak" at ''
World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM i ...
''
Saluan–Banggai languages
Languages of Sulawesi
{{celebic-lang-stub