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 Southea ...

language of Brunei and neighbouring Malaysia. It is spoken by the

Belait people The Belait people are a Bruneian ethnic group native to Belait District. They traditionally speak the Belait language. They are predominantly Muslim. They are officially one of the seven ethnic groups which make up the Bruneian Malay race. Or ...

who mainly reside in the Bruneian

Belait District Belait District (; Jawi: دأيره بلأيت), or simply Belait (), is the largest as well as the westernmost district in Brunei. It has an area of and the population of 69,062 as of 2016. The administrative town is Kuala Belait, located at ...

. There were estimated to be 700 speakers in 1995.

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 Metting 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 Unpublished BA Thesis, Department of Malay Language and Linguistics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam.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 Metting dialect. Other dialects may vary in their phonology and lexicon.

Consonants

Vowels

Metting Belait has five

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...

vowels . There is one

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, 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 speech ...

. 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 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 "b ...

. 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 ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

s and

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

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/aspectuals * Deictics/demonstratives

Basic clause structure

Belait is

head-initial In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the ...

. 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 phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the argument ...

s. Most clauses consist of a

predicate Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: **Predicate (mathematical logic) **Propositional function **Finitary relation, o ...

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 different languages employ different orders. C ...

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 whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs ar ...

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 The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the i ...

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