The Sasak language is spoken by the
Sasak ethnic group, which make up the majority of the population of
Lombok in
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 closely related to the
Balinese and
Sumbawa languages spoken on adjacent islands, and is part of the
Austronesian language family. Sasak has no official status; the national language,
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
, is the official and literary language in areas where Sasak is spoken.
Some of its dialects, which correspond to regions of Lombok, have a low
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...
. Sasak has a system of speech levels in which different words are used depending on the social level of the addressee relative to the speaker, similar to neighbouring
Javanese and
Balinese.
Not widely read or written today, Sasak is used in traditional texts written on dried
lontar leaves and read on ceremonial occasions. Traditionally, Sasak's
writing system
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...
is nearly identical to
Balinese script.
Speakers
Sasak is spoken by the
Sasak people on the island of Lombok in
West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, which is located between the island of
Bali
Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nu ...
(on the west) and
Sumbawa (on the east). Its speakers numbered about 2.7 million in 2010, roughly 85 percent of Lombok's population. Sasak is used in families and villages, but has no formal status. The national language,
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
, is the language of education, government, literacy and inter-ethnic communication. The Sasak are not the only ethnic group in Lombok; about 300,000
Balinese people
The Balinese people ( id, suku Bali; ban, ᬳᬦᬓ᭄ᬩᬮᬶ, anak Bali) are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the Indonesian island of Bali. The Balinese population of 4.2 million (1.7% of Indonesia's population) live mostly on the ...
live primarily in the western part of the island and near
Mataram, the provincial capital of
West Nusa Tenggara. In urban areas with more ethnic diversity there is some language shift towards Indonesian, mainly in the forms of
code-switching and
mixing rather than an abandoning of Sasak.
Classification and related languages
Austronesian linguist
K. Alexander Adelaar
Karl Alexander "Sander" Adelaar (born 1953 in The Hague) is a Dutch linguist. He is primarily interested in the Austronesian languages of Borneo, Madagascar, and Taiwan, as well as the Malayic languages. He also does research on the oral and lite ...
classified Sasak as one of the
Malayo-Sumbawan languages
The Malayo-Sumbawan languages are a proposed subgroup of the Austronesian languages that unites the Malayic and Chamic languages with the languages of Java and the western Lesser Sunda Islands (western Indonesia), except for Javanese (Adelaar 2 ...
group (a group he first identified) of the
western Malayo-Polynesian family in a 2005 paper. Sasak's closest sister language is
Sumbawa and, with
Balinese, they form the
Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa (BSS) subgroup. BSS,
Malayic
The Malayic languages are a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family. The most prominent member is Malay, which is the national language of Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia; it further serves as basis for Indon ...
(which includes
Malay
Malay may refer to:
Languages
* Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore
** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century
** Indonesi ...
,
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
and
Minangkabau) and
Chamic
The Chamic languages, also known as Aceh–Chamic and Achinese–Chamic, are a group of ten languages spoken in Aceh (Sumatra, Indonesia) and in parts of Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Hainan, China. The Chamic languages are a subgroup of Malay ...
(which includes
Acehnese) form one branch of the Malayo-Sumbawan group. The two other branches are
Sundanese
Sundanese may refer to:
* Sundanese people
* Sundanese language
* Sundanese script
Standard Sundanese script (''Aksara Sunda Baku'', ) is a writing system which is used by the Sundanese people. It is built based on Old Sundanese script (' ...
and
Madurese. This classification puts
Javanese, previously thought to belong to the same group, outside the Malayo-Sumbawan group in a different branch of the western Malayo-Polynesian family.
The Malayo-Sumbawan proposal, however, is rejected by
Blust (2010) and Smith (2017), who included the BSS languages in the putative "Western Indonesian" subgroup, alongside Javanese, Madurese, Sundanese,
Lampung,
Greater Barito and
Greater North Borneo languages.
Kawi, a literary language based on
Old Javanese, has significantly influenced Sasak. It is used in Sasak puppet theatre, poetry and some
lontar-based texts, sometimes mixed with Sasak. Kawi is also used for hyperpoliteness (a speech level above Sasak's "high" level), especially by the upper class known as the ''mènak''.
Phonology
Eight vowels appear in Sasak dialects, contrasting with each other differently by dialect. They are represented in Latin orthography by , , , and , with diacritics sometimes used to distinguish conflated sounds. The usual Indonesian practice is to use for the
schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
, for the
close-mid front vowel, for the
open-mid front vowel, for the
close-mid back vowel and for the
open-mid back vowel.
Diphthongs
Sasak has the
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
s (two vowels combined in the same syllable) , , , , and .
Morphophonology
Sasak words have a single stress on the final syllable. Final in Sasak
root
In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the sur ...
s change phonetically to a
tense (
mid central vowel
The mid central vowel (also known as schwa) is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a ə, rotated lowercase letter e.
While the ''Handbook of th ...
); for example, ('to read') will be realized (and spelled) as , but when affixed the vowel stays the same, as in , 'reading' and , 'reading instrument'. In
compounding
In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of a custom formulation of a medication to fit a unique need of a patient that cannot be met with commercially available products. This may be done for me ...
, if the first element ends in a vowel, the element will take a nasal linker ( in most dialects, in some). For example, compounding ('eye') and ('hair') will result in ('eyelash').
Grammar
Sasak has a flexible
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
, typical of Indonesian
western Austronesian (WAN) languages. Frequency distributions of the various word orders are influenced by the verb forms in the clause (i.e. whether the clause involves a nasal or an unmarked verb, see
#Verbs). Clauses involving the nasal verb form are predominantly
subject-verb-object (SVO), similar to
actor-focus classes in other Indonesian WAN languages. In contrast, clauses with an unmarked verb form do not have a dominant word order; three of the six possible orders (
subject-verb-object,
verb-subject-object and
object-verb-subject) occur with roughly-equal frequency.
Verbs, like those of other western Indonesian languages, are not conjugated for
tense,
mood or
aspect
Aspect or Aspects may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art
* Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company
* Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England
* ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...
. All
affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...
es are
derivational. Verbs may appear in two forms: unmarked (also known as basic or oral) and nasal. The basic form appears in vocabulary lists and dictionaries, and the nasal form adds the nasal prefix ''n-''. The nasal prefix, which also appears as ''nge-'', ''m-'' and other forms, may delete the first consonant of the basic form. For example, the unmarked form of 'to buy' is and the nasal form is . The nasal prefix can also turn a noun into the corresponding verb; for example, ('coffee') becomes ('to drink coffee'). The function of the prefix and nasal derivations from the basic form differ by dialect. For example, eastern dialects of Sasak have three types of nasalization: the first marks transitive verbs, the second is used for
predicate focus, and the third is for a
durative action with a non-specific
patient
A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health c ...
.
Imperative and
hortative
In linguistics, hortative modalities (; abbreviated ) are verbal expressions used by the speaker to encourage or discourage an action. Different hortatives can be used to express greater or lesser intensity, or the speaker's attitude, for or a ...
sentences use the basic form.
Sasak has a variety of
clitics
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...
, a
grammatical unit pronounced as part of a word (like an affix) but a separate word syntactically—similar to the
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
clitic
'll
''Shall'' and ''will'' are two of the English modal verbs. They have various uses, including the expression of propositions about the future, in what is usually referred to as the future tense of English.
Historically, prescriptive grammar sta ...
.
Simple clitics occur in a
demonstrative
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
specifier attached to a previous noun or
noun phrase; for example, ('this') in ('this person').
Special clitics occur with noun hosts to encode
inalienable possession
In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alie ...
, and with other hosts to encode
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
s and
patient
A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health c ...
s. For example, the possessive clitic (or or , depending on dialect)—which means 'my' and corresponds to the pronoun ('I')—can attach to the noun ('hand') for ('my hand').
Variations
Regional
Sasak has significant regional variations, including by
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
,
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...
and
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
. Native speakers recognize five labelled dialects, named for how "like that" and "like this" are pronounced: Kutó-Kuté (predominant in North Sasak), Nggetó-Nggeté (Northeast Sasak), Menó-Mené (Central Sasak), Ngenó-Ngené (Central East Sasak, Central West Sasak) and Meriaq-Meriku (Central South Sasak).
However, linguist
Peter K. Austin said that the five labels do not "reflect fully the extensive geographical variation ... found within Sasak" in many linguistic areas. Some dialects have a low
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...
.
[
]
Speech levels
Sasak has a system of speech levels in which different words are used, depending on the social level of the addressee relative to the speaker. The system is similar to that of Balinese and Javanese (languages spoken on neighbouring islands) and Korean. There are three levels in Sasak for the status of the addressee (low, mid- and high), and a humble-honorific dimension which notes the relationship between the speaker and another referent. For example, 'you' may be expressed as (low-level), (mid-), (high) or (honorific). 'To eat' is (low), (mid-), (high) or (honorific).
All forms except low are known as ('smooth' or 'polite') in Sasak. They are used in formal contexts and with social superiors, especially in situations involving (the traditional upper caste, which makes up eight percent of the population). The system is observed in regional varieties of the language. Although low-level terms have large regional variations, non-low forms are consistent in all varieties. According to Indonesian languages specialist Bernd Nothofer
Bernd Nothofer (born 18 December 1941 in Krefeld, Germany) is a German linguist. His primary research interests include Austronesian historical linguistics, Malayic dialectology, and the languages of Indonesia.
Education
After graduating from hi ...
, the system is borrowed from Balinese or Javanese.
Literature
The Sasak have a tradition of writing on dried leaves of the lontar palm. The Javanese Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire, whose sphere of influence included Lombok, probably introduced literacy to the island during the fourteenth century. The oldest surviving lontar texts date to the nineteenth century; many were collected by the Dutch and kept in libraries in Leiden
Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...
or Bali
Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nu ...
. The Mataram Museum in Lombok also has a collection, and many individuals and families on the island keep them as heirlooms to be passed from generation to generation.
The lontar texts are still read today in performances known as . Readings are made for a number of occasions, including funerals, weddings and circumcision
Circumcision is a surgical procedure, procedure that removes the foreskin from the human penis. In the most common form of the operation, the foreskin is extended with forceps, then a circumcision device may be placed, after which the foreskin ...
ceremonies. Rural Sasak read the lontar texts as part of a ritual to ensure the fertility of their farm animals. Peter K. Austin described a which was performed as part of a circumcision ceremony in 2002, with paper copies of lontar texts rather than palm leaves.
Lombok's lontar texts are written in Sasak, Kawi (a literary language based on old Javanese) or a combination of the two. They are written in , a script nearly identical to Balinese. Its basic letters consist of a consonant plus the vowel ''a''. The first five letters read , , , and , giving the script its name. Syllables with vowels other than ''a'' use the basic letter plus diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s above, below or around it. Final consonants of a syllable or consonant clusters may also be encoded.
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
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External links
Online Dictionary Sasak language - English
* David Goldsworthy's collection of Music of Indonesia and Malaysia archived with Paradisec
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to ...
includes open access recordings i
Sasak
{{Authority control
Languages of Indonesia
Bali–Sasak–Sumbawa languages
Lombok