The Bima language, or Bimanese (Bima: ''Nggahi Mbojo'', Indonesian: ''Bahasa Bima'') is an Austronesian language spoken on the eastern half of

Sumbawa Sumbawa is an Indonesian island, located in the middle of the Lesser Sunda Islands chain, with Lombok to the west, Flores to the east, and Sumba further to the southeast. Along with Lombok, it forms the province of West Nusa Tenggara, but th ...

Island,

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 Gui ...

, which it shares with speakers of the

Sumbawa language Sumbawa (; id, bahasa Sumbawa) or Sumbawarese is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the western half of Sumbawa Island, Indonesia, which it shares with speakers of Bima. It is closely related to the languages of adjacent Lombok and Bali; indeed, i ...

. Bima territory includes the

Sanggar Peninsula Mount Tambora, or Tomboro, is an active stratovolcano in West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. Located on Sumbawa in the Lesser Sunda Islands, it was formed by the active subduction zones beneath it. Before 1815, its elevation reached more than high ...

, where the extinct Papuan language Tambora was once spoken. "Bima" is an exonym; the autochthonous name for the territory is "Mbojo" and the language is referred to as "Nggahi Mbojo." There are over half a million Bima speakers. Neither the Bima nor the Sumbawa people have alphabets of their own for they use the alphabets of the

Bugis The Bugis people (pronounced ), also known as Buginese, are an ethnicity—the most numerous of the three major linguistic and ethnic groups of South Sulawesi (the others being Makassar and Toraja), in the south-western province of Sulawesi ...

and the

Malay language Malay (; ms, Bahasa Melayu, links=no, Jawi: , Rencong: ) is an Austronesian language that is an official language of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and that is also spoken in East Timor and parts of the Philippines an ...

indifferently.

Classification

Long thought to be closely related to the languages of Sumba Island to the southeast, this assumption has been refuted by Blust (2008), which makes Bima a primary branch within the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroup.

Distribution

Bima is primarily spoken on the eastern half of

Island in

. It also spoken in the

Banta Banta Soda, or Banta, also Goli Soda or Goti Soda and Fotash Jawl, is a popular carbonated lemon or orange-flavoured soft drink sold in India since the late 19th century in a distinctly shaped iconic Codd-neck bottle. The pressure created by t ...

Sangeang Sangeang Api (Gunung Api or Gunung Sangeang) is an active complex volcano on the island of Sangeang in Indonesia. It consists of two volcanic cones, Doro Api and Doro Mantoi. Sangeang Api is one of the most active volcanoes in the Lesser Sunda I ...

, and

Komodo Komodo may refer to: Computers * Komodo Edit, a free text editor for dynamic programming languages * Komodo IDE an integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic programming languages * Komodo (chess), a chess engine People * Komo ...

islands.

Dialects

According to Ethnologue, dialects of the language include Kolo, Sangar (Sanggar), Toloweri, Bima, and Mbojo. Donggo, spoken in mountainous regions to the west of

Bima Bay Bima Bay (Indonesian: ''Teluk Bima'') is a major waterway on the north side of the island of Sumbawa, and is adjacent to Bima Bima (Indonesia: ''Kota Bima'') is a city on the eastern coast of the island of Sumbawa in central Indonesia's province ...

, such as in Doro Ntika of the Doro Oromboha area, is closely related to the main dialect of Bima. It is spoken by about 25,000 people who were formerly primarily Christians and animists; many have converted to Islam, mostly as a result of intermarriages.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Vowels /i e o u/ can have shortened allophones as � ɛ ɔ ʊ

References

External links

* Paradisec has a collection o
open access recordings of Bima
from a 2005 language documentation class, as well a
some recordings
from

Robert Blust Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blu ...

. *

Kaipuleohone Kaipuleohone is a digital ethnographic archive that houses audio and visual files, photographs, as well as hundreds of textual material such as notes, dictionaries, and transcriptions relating to small and endangered languages. The archive is stored ...

also has an open-access collection of Robert Blust's materials including a recording of Bima. * https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22150-biima-script.pdf Languages of Indonesia Central Malayo-Polynesian languages Sumbawa {{austronesian-lang-stub