Rongga is a language of central
Flores
Flores is one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, a group of islands in the eastern half of Indonesia. Including the Komodo Islands off its west coast (but excluding the Solor Archipelago to the east of Flores), the land area is 15,530.58 km2, and th ...
, in
East Nusa Tenggara
East Nusa Tenggara ( id, Nusa Tenggara Timur – NTT; pt, Sonda Oriental) is the southernmost province of Indonesia. It comprises the eastern portion of the Lesser Sunda Islands, facing the Indian Ocean in the south and the Flores Sea in the nor ...
Province,
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 ...
. Rongga is closely related to
Ngadha
Ngadha (, previously spelled Ngada) is an Austronesian language, one of six languages spoken in the central stretch of the Indonesian island of Flores. From west to east these languages are Ngadha, Nage, Keo, Ende, Lio, and Palu'e. These langu ...
, and more distantly to
Manggarai
The Manggarai are an ethnic group found in western Flores in the East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia. Manggarai people are spread across three regencies in the province, namely the West Manggarai Regency, Manggarai Regency and East Manggarai Re ...
.
[ Arka, I Wayan (2005). ‘Challenges and Prospect of Maintaining Rongga: A Preliminary Ethnographic Report’, in Ilana Mushin (ed.), Proceedings of the (2004) Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. ]
Locally, it is considered part of the
Manggarai culture,
however its closer linguistic relatives include
Ngadha
Ngadha (, previously spelled Ngada) is an Austronesian language, one of six languages spoken in the central stretch of the Indonesian island of Flores. From west to east these languages are Ngadha, Nage, Keo, Ende, Lio, and Palu'e. These langu ...
and
Lio
Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos (born 17 June 1962), known professionally as Lio, is a Portuguese-Belgian singer and actress who was a pop icon in France and Belgium during the 1980s.
Life and career
Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furt ...
, both belonging to the
Central Flores subgroup.
Typologically, it is an
isolating language
An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages a ...
.
Like other Central Flores languages, it uses elements of a
base-5 numeral system, possibly exhibiting the influence of a hypothetical
Papuan linguistic substratum
In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or sup ...
.
When written, it is spelled with Indonesian-like orthographic conventions. Digraphs such as ''zh'', ''dh'' and ''bh'' are used to record sounds specific to this language.
References
Bibliography
*
Sumba languages
Languages of Indonesia
{{au-lang-stub