Makassarese language

Makassarese ( or ), sometimes called Makasar, Makassar, or Macassar, is a language of the Makassarese people, spoken in South Sulawesi province of Indonesia. It is a member of the South Sulawesi group of the Austronesian language family, and thus closely related to, among others, Buginese.

Phonology

The following description of Makassarese phonology is based on Jukes (2005).

Vowels

Makassarese has five vowels: , , , , . The mid vowels are lowered to and in absolute final position and in the vowel sequences and .

Consonants

* is written before a vowel, before and
* is written
* is written
* is written
* only occurs in loanwords
* The glottal stop only occurs in syllable-final position. It is written as in the orthography promoted as the standard by the government and based on the practice in Indonesian, as an apostrophe in other orthographic standards, sometimes as in academical writing, or not written at all in informal writing.

Phonotactics

All consonants except for can appear in initial position. In final position, only and are found.

Consonant clusters only occur medially and (with one exception) can be analyzed as clusters of or + consonant. These clusters also arise through sandhi across morpheme boundaries.

The geminate cluster is only found in root-internal position and cannot be accounted for by the above rules.

Sequences of like vowels are contracted to a single vowel, e.g. 'to wash' + ''-ang'' 'nominalizing suffix' > 'laundry', 'small' + ''-i'' 'third person' > 'it is small'.

Current writing systems

Although Makassarese is now often written in Latin script, it is still widely written using Lontara script, which once was used also to write important documents in Bugis and Mandar, two related languages from Sulawesi.

Examples

Some common words/phrases in the Makasar language, transcribed in the Latin script, are as follows ( = glottal stop):

Historical writing systems

Makassarese was historically written using Makasar script (also known as "Old Makassarese" or "Makassarese bird script" in English-language scholarly works).
In Makassarese the script is known as or ('bird letters'). It was used for official purposes in the kingdoms of Makasar in the 17th century but ceased to be used by the 19th century, being replaced by Lontara script.

In spite of their quite distinctive appearance, both the Makasar and Lontara scripts are derived from the ancient Brahmi script of India. Like other descendants of that script, each consonant has an inherent vowel "a", which is not marked. Other vowels can be indicated by adding diacritics above, below, or on either side of each consonant.

Further, Makassarese was written in the Serang script, a variant of the Arabic-derived Jawi script. Texts written in the Serang script are relatively rare, and mostly appear in connection with Islam-related topics. Parts of the ''Makassar Annals'', the chronicles of the Gowa and Tallo' kingdoms, were also written using the Serang script.

See also

* Makassan contact with Australia

References

External links

Makassar pronunciation and alphabet
at ''Omniglot''



Lontara Alphabet in Unicode
* http://unicode-table.com/en/sections/buginese/

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Languages of Sulawesi
South Sulawesi languages