Bontoc (Bontok) is a macrolanguage native to the indigenous Bontoc people of the

Mountain Province Mountain Province (; ; ; ; ; ) is a landlocked province of the Philippines in the Cordillera Administrative Region in Luzon. Its capital is Bontoc while Bauko is the largest municipality. Mountain Province was formerly referred to as Mountain ...

, in the northern part of the

Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...

Specific languages

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

'' reports the following locations for each of the five Bontok languages. Speaker populations from the 2007 census, as quoted in ''Ethnologue''.

Phonology

* The

archiphoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

has , , and as its

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

s. The allophone occurs word-initially, adjacent to , as the second member of a consonant cluster consisting of a

coronal consonant Coronals are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Among places of articulation, only the coronal consonants can be divided into as many articulation types: apical (using the tip of the tongue), laminal (using the ...

and , and as the second member of any consonant cluster preceded by . occurs in

free variation In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such ...

with word-initially, but otherwise occurs in

complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution (as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation) is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...

with it. occurs in free variation with and word-initially, and with elsewhere. These /r/ sounds are even applied to loanwords from Ilokano and Tagalog, and Spanish loanwords from the 2 languages. * The plosives , , , and have, respectively, (representing an

interdental consonant Interdental consonants are produced by placing the tip of the tongue between the upper and lower front teeth. That differs from typical dental consonants, which are articulated with the tongue against the ''back'' of the upper incisors. No langu ...

), , , and as their syllable-initial allophones. * The voiced stop also has and as its allophones. Both of these allophones occur as the first member of a

geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

cluster. They are in free variation. * The approximant has one allophone: . occurs after . becomes a slightly centralized when in a syllable whose coda is . When in the nucleus, and are slightly raised and is lowered. There are two degrees of stress in Bontoc: primary and secondary. Primary stress is phonemic and secondary stress is predictable. Both types are right-oriented and occur on one of the last three syllables. Stress's effects include higher pitch, louder volume, and lengthening of the syllable nucleus, though these are all subject to certain rules pertaining to word prosody.

Example text

The Lord's Prayer

References

External links