Belait, or Lemeting, is a

Malayo-Polynesian The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...

language of Brunei and neighbouring Malaysia. It is spoken by the Belait people who mainly reside in the Bruneian Belait District. There were estimated to be 700 speakers in 1995.Martin, Peter W. 1995. 'Whither the indigenous languages of Brunei Darussalam?' ''Oceanic Linguistics'' 34:44–60

Classification

Belait is related to the Miri, Kiput and Narum languages of Sarawak. It is considered part of the Lower Baram subgroup of North Sarawak languages.

Dialects

There are four mutually-intelligible dialects of Belait.Clynes, Adrian. 2005. 'Belait'. In Nikolaus P. Himmelmann & Alexander Adelaar (eds.) The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar. Abingdon: Routledge. These are spoken in two main regions: * In the villages of Kuala Balai and Labi * In the Kiudang subdistrict of Tutong Two distinct dialects of Belait – Metting and Bong – are spoken within the Mungkom village, Kiudang. There are very few speakers of any of the dialects.

Phonology

General references on Belait phonology include Martin (1990) on Metteng Belait and Noor Alifah Abdullah (1992) on Labi Belait.Noor Alifah Abdullah. 1992. Struktur bahasa Belait. Unpublished BA Thesis, Department of Malay Language and Linguistics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. This sketch is based on the Metteng dialect (Clynes 2005). Other dialects may vary in their phonology and lexicon.

Consonants

Vowels

Metteng Belait has five

monophthong A monophthong ( ) is a pure vowel sound, or one whose articulation at beginning and end is relatively fixed, with the tongue moving neither up nor down and neither forward nor backward towards a new position of articulation. A monophthong can be ...

vowels . There is one

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, 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 phoneme is realised as in non-final syllables, and as and in final syllables.

Syllable structure

Lexical roots are

disyllabic A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

. Final syllables are typically (C)V((C)C). Non-final are typically ((C)C)V(C).

Grammar

Word classes

The major word classes in Belait are

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

s and

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

s. The two classes can be distinguished by their distribution, form and function. For example, verbs are negated with the form and nouns with the form : There are also several closed functional classes: * Pronouns * Prepositions * Classifiers * Numerals * Modals and aspectuals * Deictics (including demonstratives)

Basic clause structure

Belait is

head-initial In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed Principles and parameters, parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head (linguistics), head of a phrase precedes its Complement (linguistics), complement ...

. This means that head nouns precede possessors and other

modifiers In linguistics, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure which ''modifies'' the meaning of another element in the structure. For instance, the adjective "red" acts as a modifier in the noun phrase "red ball", provi ...

. They also precede

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

s. Most clauses consist of a predicate and a subject. The subject can either follow or precede the predicate. Hence,

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 languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

is flexible. Predicates can be Verb Phrases (VP), Noun Phrases (NP) or a Prepositional Phrase (PP). Non-subject arguments of a verbal predicate occur immediately after the verb.

Verbal predicates

The head of a verbal predicate is the

. There are two main types of verbs in Belait:

intransitive In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additi ...

and transitive. Intransitive verbs only have a single subject argument. They do not have any voice morphology on the verb. In contrast, transitive verbs occur in two different voices: Actor Voice (AV) and Undergoer Voice (UV). The two constructions are illustrated below:

In the AV construction in (5) the subject is the Actor, i.e. 'the people before'. In the UV construction in (6) the subject in the Undergoer, i.e. 'durian'. In both cases, the subject comes before the predicate. The undergoer voice typically has perfective semantics. The actor voice tends to be used in other contexts.

References

{{authority control Berawan–Lower Baram languages Languages of Brunei Languages of Malaysia Endangered Austronesian languages