Balantak 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 at the head of the eastern peninsula of
Sulawesi
Sulawesi ( ), also known as Celebes ( ), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the List of islands by area, world's 11th-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Min ...
,
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 is classified as a member of the
Saluan-Banggai branch of the
Celebic subgroup. The Balantak language is the primary language of the Balantak people. Although 90% of the population are also proficient in
Indonesian, the vernacular is still vigorously used in everyday contexts, and most children only speak Balantak before entering school.
Phonology
Balantak has the following phoneme inventory:
Sequences of like vowels are phonetically realized as long vowels, e.g. 'cigarette', 'coconut'.
References
Further reading
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External links
"Balantak" at ''
World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-RO ...
''
Saluan–Banggai languages
Languages of Sulawesi
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