Wolio is an
Austronesian language spoken in and around
Baubau
Baubau is a city in Southeast Sulawesi province, Indonesia. The city is located on the southwest coast of Buton island. Baubau attained city status on 21 June 2001, based on Indonesian Law Number 13, for the year 2001. It covers an area of 294.9 ...
on
Buton Island
Buton (also Butung, Boeton or Button) is an island in Indonesia located off the southeast peninsula of Sulawesi. It covers roughly 4,727 square kilometers in area, or about the size of Madura; it is the 129th largest island in the world and In ...
,
Southeast Sulawesi
Southeast Sulawesi ( id, Sulawesi Tenggara) is a province on the island of Sulawesi, forming the southeastern peninsula of that island, together with a number of substantial offshore islands such as Buton, Muna, Kabaena and Wawonii (formerly ca ...
,
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 belongs to the
Wotu–Wolio branch of the
Celebic subgroup. Also known as Buton, it is a trade language and the former court language of the Sultan at Baubau. Today it is an official regional language; street signs are written in the
Buri Wolio alphabet, based on the Arabic script.
Phonology
The five vowels are . The consonant system is characterized by the presence of
prenasalized stops, which are treated as a single sound in Wolio.
are found in
loans
In finance, a loan is the lending of money by one or more individuals, organizations, or other entities to other individuals, organizations, etc. The recipient (i.e., the borrower) incurs a debt and is usually liable to pay interest on that de ...
, mostly from
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
.
Stress is on the penultimate syllable, and only
open syllables
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
are allowed.
Grammar
Wolio personal pronouns have one independent form, and three bound forms.
Number is not distinguished in third person. Optionally, plural number can be expressed by means of the plural-marker : "they".
See also
*
Cia-Cia language
Cia-Cia (''Bahasa Ciacia'', ''바하사 찌아찌아'', ''بهاس چيا-چيا''), also known as Buton or Butonese, is an Austronesian language spoken principally around the city of Baubau on the southern tip of Buton Island off the southeas ...
*
List of loan words in Indonesian
The Indonesian language has absorbed many loanwords from other languages, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other Austronesian languages.
Indonesian differs from the form of Malay used in ...
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
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Wotu–Wolio languages
Languages of Sulawesi
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