Wolio is an

Austronesian language The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...

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 after Law Number 13 of 2001 was passed. It covers an area of , of which about i ...

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 List of islands by area, largest is ...

Southeast Sulawesi Southeast Sulawesi (, ; often abbreviated to Sultra, ), 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 Wawon ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

. 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. Wolio has lexical borrowings from Malay, Arabic, and Dutch. Local languages of eastern Indonesia, such as

Bugis The Bugis people, also known as Buginese, are an Austronesian ethnic groupthe most numerous of the three major linguistic and ethnic groups of South Sulawesi (the others being Makassarese and Torajan), in the south-western province of Sula ...

Makasar Makassar ( ), formerly Ujung Pandang ( ), is the capital of the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi. It is the largest city in the region of Eastern Indonesia and the country's fifth-largest urban center after Jakarta, Surabaya, Medan, and Ba ...

, and

Ternate Ternate (), also known as the City of Ternate (; ), is the List of regencies and cities of Indonesia, city with the largest population in the province of North Maluku and an island in the Maluku Islands, Indonesia. It was the ''de facto'' provi ...

, have also been influential. The name "Buton", which also refers generically to various ethnic and linguistic groups of the Buton area, is said to be of Ternatese origin (''butu'', ‘market; marketplace’).

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 tender of money by one party to another with an agreement to pay it back. The recipient, or borrower, incurs a debt and is usually required to pay interest for the use of the money. The document evidencing the debt ( ...

, mostly from

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

. Stress is on the penultimate syllable, and only open syllables 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'.

References

Bibliography

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Phonology

Grammar

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading