The Gorontalo language (also called Hulontalo) is a language spoken in

Gorontalo Province Gorontalo ( Gorontaloan: ''Hulontalo'') is a province of Indonesia on the island of Sulawesi. Located on the Minahasa Peninsula, Gorontalo was formerly part of the province of North Sulawesi until its inauguration as a separate province on 5 De ...

Sulawesi Sulawesi (), also known as Celebes (), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Ar ...

, Indonesia by the Gorontalo people.

Dialects

Musa Kasim et al. (1981) give five main dialects of Gorontalo: east Gorontalo, Limboto, Gorontolo City, west Gorontalo, and

Tilamuta Tilamuta is a town in Sulawesi 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, ...

Phonology

Consonants

Consonant sequences include NC (

homorganic In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from ''homo-'' "same" and ''organ'' "(speech) organ") is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another since ...

nasal–plosive), where C may be . Elsewhere, are relatively rare and only occur before

high vowel A close vowel, also known as a high vowel (in U.S. terminology), is any in a class of vowel sounds used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of th ...

s. , written in the literature, is a laminal post-alveoral coronal stop that is indeterminate as to voicing. The phonemic status of is unclear; if is interpreted as vowel sequences , then this contrasts with long vowels (where the two V's are the same) and vowel sequences separated by linking glides (where the two V's are different).

Vowels

Gorontalo has five vowels.

Notes

References

* * * * Gorontalo–Mongondow languages Languages of Sulawesi {{GCPhilippine-lang-stub