Tukang Besi is an Austronesian language spoken in the

Tukangbesi Islands Tukangbesi Islands, is a group of islands off the coast of Sulawesi immediately east of Buton island in the Banda Sea region, and part of Sulawesi Tenggara. "Tukang Besi" literally means "iron worker" or "blacksmith" in Indonesian. There is a T ...

in southeast 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, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

by a quarter million speakers. A Tukang Besi pidgin is used in the area.

Phonology

The northern dialect of Tukang Besi has 25 consonant

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s and a basic 5-vowel system. It features stress which is usually on the second-to-last syllable. The language has two

implosive consonant Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller ...

s, which are uncommon in the world's languages. The coronal plosives and have prenasalized counterparts which act as separate phonemes. Tukang Besi vowel chart

Notes: * only appears in loanwords, but it contrasts with * and are not phonemic and appear only as

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

s of , which appears only in loanwords.

Orthography

Vowels

* a - /ɐ* e - �/e* i - /ɪ* o - /ɔ* u - �/uh2>

Consonants

* b - �/ʔɓ/ʔb/β* b̠ - * c - ͡ʃ* d - �̪* d̠ - /d͡ʒ/z* g - /ɠ/ʔɠ/ɣ* h - /ɸ* j - ͡ʒ* k - /c* l - ̪* m - * mb - b* mp - p* n - * nd - ̪d̪* ns - ̪s̪* nt - ̪t̪* ng - �* ngg - �ɡ* ngk - �k* nj - ̪d̪* p - * r - * s - * t - ̪* w - * ' - �

Grammar

Nouns

Tukang Besi does not have grammatical gender or number. It is an ergative–absolutive language.

Verbs

Tukang Besi has an inflectional future tense, which is indicated with a prefix, but no past tense.

Word Order

Tukang Besi uses verb-object-subject word order, which is also used by Fijian. Like many Austronesian languages, it has prepositions, but places adjectives, genitives, and determiners after nouns. Yes-no questions are indicated by a particle at the end of the sentence.