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The Bima language, or Bimanese (Bima: , Indonesian: ), is an Austronesian language spoken on the eastern half of
Sumbawa Sumbawa, is an Indonesian island, located in the middle of the Lesser Sunda Islands chain, with Lombok to the west, Flores to the east, and Sumba further to the southeast. Along with Lombok, it forms the province of West Nusa Tenggara, but th ...
Island,
Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...
, which it shares with speakers of the Sumbawa language. Bima territory includes the Sanggar Peninsula, where the extinct Papuan language Tambora was once spoken. ''Bima'' is an exonym; the autochthonous name for the territory is ''Mbojo'' and the language is referred to as ''Nggahi Mbojo''. There are over half a million Bima speakers. Neither the Bima nor the Sumbawa people have alphabets of their own for they use the alphabets of the
Bugis The Bugis people, also known as Buginese, are an Austronesian ethnic groupthe most numerous of the three major linguistic and ethnic groups of South Sulawesi (the others being Makassarese and Torajan), in the south-western province of Sula ...
and the
Malay language Malay ( , ; , Jawi alphabet, Jawi: ) is an Austronesian languages, Austronesian language spoken primarily by Malays (ethnic group), Malays in several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula on the mainland Asia. The lang ...
indifferently.


Classification

Long thought to be closely related to the languages of Sumba Island to the southeast, this assumption has been refuted by Blust (2008), which makes Bima a primary branch within the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroup.


Distribution

Bima is primarily spoken on the eastern half of
Sumbawa Sumbawa, is an Indonesian island, located in the middle of the Lesser Sunda Islands chain, with Lombok to the west, Flores to the east, and Sumba further to the southeast. Along with Lombok, it forms the province of West Nusa Tenggara, but th ...
Island in
Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...
. It also spoken in the Banta, Sangeang, and Komodo islands.


Dialects

According to ''Ethnologue'', dialects of the language include Kolo, Sangar (Sanggar), Toloweri, Bima, and Mbojo. Donggo, spoken in mountainous regions to the west of Bima Bay, such as in Doro Ntika of the Doro Oromboha area, is closely related to the main dialect of Bima. It is spoken by about 25,000 people who were formerly primarily Christians and animists; many have converted to Islam, mostly as a result of intermarriages.


Phonology


Consonants


Vowels

Vowels can have shortened allophones as .


References


Further reading

* * *


External links

* Paradisec has a collection o
open access recordings of Bima
from a 2005 language documentation class, as well a
some recordings
from Robert Blust. * Kaipuleohone also has an open-access collection of Robert Blust's materials including a recording of Bima. * https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22150-biima-script.pdf {{authority control Languages of Indonesia Central Malayo-Polynesian languages Sumbawa