Kelabit is one of the most remote languages of

Borneo Borneo (; id, Kalimantan) is the third-largest island in the world and the largest in Asia. At the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, in relation to major Indonesian islands, it is located north of Java, west of Sulawesi, and ea ...

, on the

Sarawak Sarawak (; ) is a state of Malaysia. The largest among the 13 states, with an area almost equal to that of Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak is located in northwest Borneo Island, and is bordered by the Malaysian state of Sabah to the northeast, ...

– North Kalimantan border. It is spoken by one of the smallest ethnicities in Borneo, the

Kelabit people The Kelabit are an indigenous Dayak people of the Sarawak/North Kalimantan highlands of Borneo with a minority in the neighbouring state of Brunei. They have close ties to the Lun Bawang. The elevation there is slightly over 1,200 meters. ...

Phonology

Kelabit vowels are . All consonants but the aspirated voiced stops are lengthened after stressed . Stress generally occurs on the penultimate syllable. Kelabit is notable for having "a typologically rare series of true voiced aspirates" (that is, not

breathy voice Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like ...

/murmured consonants; for some speakers they are

prevoiced Prevoicing, in phonetics, is voicing before the onset of a consonant or beginning with the onset of the consonant but ending before its release. In the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology, prevoicing is transcribe ...

) along with modally voiced and

tenuis consonant In linguistics, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized. In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish ''p, t, ...

s but without an accompanying series of voiceless aspirates. It is the only language known to have voiced aspirates or murmured consonants without also having voiceless aspirated consonants, a situation that has been reconstructed for

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- ...

.See

glottalic theory The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , instead of the plain voiced ones, as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions. A forerunner of the theory was proposed by the Danish lingu ...

. At the end of a word, is pronounced . For some speakers, is affricated; in neighboring Lun Dayeh, the reflex of this consonant is an unaspirated affricate . is rare, and is not attested from all dialects. The flap is alveolar. It's not clear if and the other coronal sonorants are alveolar like or dental like . The aspirated voiced series only occurs intervocalically, and may have arisen from geminate consonants. They are at least impressionistically twice as long as other stops. They vary with under suffixation, with occurring where other consonants would be allophonically geminated: * 'to fell' > 'fell it!' * 'back (n)' > 'to be left behind' There are several arguments for analyzing the aspirated voiced consonants as segments rather than as consonant clusters: *There are no (other) clusters allowed in the language. Some languages allow only geminate consonants as clusters, but there are no (other) phonemic geminates in Kelabit. In some related languages, such as

Ida'an The Ida'an (Idahan or Eraan or Sabahan) people are an ethnic group of Borneo, residing primarily in the Lahad Datu districts on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia. Their current population is estimated to be around 6,000 (1987 estimate), but i ...

, the reflexes of these sounds clearly do behave as clusters. *The syllable break occurs before the consonants (that is, , and not in the middle (), which is the behaviour of consonant clusters (including geminates) in related languages that allow them. lower to before any non-glottal coda consonant. They do not lower before the aspirated voiced consonants, again suggesting they are not consonant clusters. The aspirated voiced series does not appear in all dialects of Kelabit or Lun Dayeh:

References

Bibliography

* Asmah Haji Omar (1983). ''The Malay Peoples of Malaysia and Their Languages''. Kuala Lumpur: Art Printing Works. * Blust, Robert (1974). The Proto-North Sarawak vowel deletion hypothesis. PhD Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. * Blust, Robert (1993). ‘Kelabit-English vocabulary’. ''Sarawak Museum Journal'' 44 (65): 141‑226. * Blust, Robert (2006). ‘The Origin of the Kelabit Voiced Aspirates: A Historical Hypothesis Revisited’. ''Oceanic Linguistics'' 45 (2): 311-338. * Blust, Robert (2016). Kelabit-Lun Dayeh Phonology, with Special Reference to the Voiced Aspirates. ''Oceanic Linguistics'' 55 (1): 246-277. * Bolang, Alexander & Tom Harrisson (1949). ‘Murut and related vocabularies with special reference to North Borneo terminology’. ''Sarawak Museum Journal'' 5: 116-124 *Douglas, R. S. (1911). ‘A comparative vocabulary of the Kayan, Kenyan and Kelabit dialects’. ''Sarawak Museum Journal'' 1 (1): 75-119. *Galih, Balang (1965). Kapah Ayo’ Tana’ Inih Pangah Penudut Guma Nepeled. How the World was Made by Guma Nepeled: A Kelabit-Murut Story. ''The Sarawak Gazette'', May 31, 152. * Hemmings, Charlotte (2015). Kelabit Voice: Philippine-Type, Indonesian-Type or Something a Bit Different? ''Transactions of the Philological Society'' 113(3): 383-405. * Hemmings, Charlotte (2016). The Kelabit Language, Austronesian Voice and Syntactic Typology. PhD Dissertation, Department of Linguistics, SOAS, University of London

* Martin, Peter W (1996). A Comparative Ethnolinguistic Survey of the Murut (Lun Bawang) with Special Reference to Brunei. In Peter W. Martin, Conrad Oz̊óg & Gloria Poedjosoedarmo (eds.), ''Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam'', 268-279. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. *Martin, Peter W. & Eileen Yen (1994). Language use among the Kelabit living in urban centres. In Peter W. Martin (ed.), ''Shifting Patterns of Language Use in Borneo'', 147 163. Williamsburg VA: Borneo Research Council.

External links

* Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), ELAR archive o
Kelabit language documentation materials
*

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 ...

archive of Robert Blust's materials includ
notes on Kelabit
Apo Duat languages Languages of Indonesia Languages of Malaysia {{austronesian-lang-stub