Mendawai is an Austronesian language spoken along the lower course of the

Arut River Arut River is a river in the province of Kalimantan Tengah, island of Borneo, Indonesia, about 700 km northeast of the capital Jakarta.

West Kotawaringin Regency West Kotawaringin Regency ( id, Kabupaten Kotawaringin Barat) is one of the thirteen regencies which comprise the Central Kalimantan Province on the island of Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. The population of West Kotawaringin Regency was 235,80 ...

Central Kalimantan Central Kalimantan ( id, Kalimantan Tengah) is a province of Indonesia. It is one of five provinces in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Its provincial capital is Palangka Raya and in 2010 its population was over 2.2 million, while the 2 ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. It is at the mutually unintelligible end of a

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...

with Ngaju. Mendawai and Ngaju share c. 70% of their basic vocabulary.

Vocabulary

References

West Barito languages Languages of Indonesia {{Austronesian-lang-stub