The Makassar languages are a group of languages spoken in the southern part of

South Sulawesi South Sulawesi () is a Provinces of Indonesia, province in the South Peninsula, Sulawesi, southern peninsula of Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Selayar Islands archipelago to the south of Sulawesi is also part of the province. The capital and largest ci ...

Province,

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, ...

, and make up one of the branches of the

subgroup in the Austronesian language family. The most prominent member of this group is Makassarese, with over two million speakers in the city of

Makassar Makassar ( ), formerly Ujung Pandang ( ), is the capital of the Indonesian Provinces of Indonesia, province of South Sulawesi. It is the largest city in the region of Eastern Indonesia and the country's fifth-largest urban center after Jakarta, ...

and neighboring areas. The status of the Makassar languages, other than Makassarese, as distinct languages is not universally accepted. In older classifications, as well as in recent studies by local linguists, they are considered to be dialects of the Makassarese language.

Languages

* Makassarese *

Bentong Bentong, the seat of Bentong District, is a town located in western Pahang, Malaysia, at the border with the state of Selangor in the west and the state of Negeri Sembilan in the south. Government Bentong Municipal Council () is the local au ...

* Coastal Konjo * Highland Konjo * Selayar

Phonology

A characteristic feature of the Makassar languages is the occurrence of

echo vowel An echo vowel, also known as a synharmonic vowel, is a paragogic vowel that repeats the final vowel in a word in speech. For example, in Chumash, when a word ends with a glottal stop and comes at the end of an intonation unit, the final vowel i ...

s with stems ending in final , or . E.g. 'bottle' is realized as in Selayar and Coastal Konjo, and as in Makassarese and Highland Konjo (the latter regularly adds a glottal stop to the echo vowel). This echo vowel is dropped if a

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

is added, but retained if followed by an

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

. Konjo (both

Coastal A coast (coastline, shoreline, seashore) is the land next to the sea or the line that forms the boundary between the land and the ocean or a lake. Coasts are influenced by the topography of the surrounding landscape and by aquatic erosion, su ...

and Highland Konjo),

, Selayar and the Labbakkang dialect of Makassarese have ''j'' and where Makassarese (Maros, Goa, Takalar, Jeneponto, Bantaeng) has ''y'' and . In some words, Coastal/Highland Konjo and Selayar have ''h'' corresponding to zero in Makassarese, e.g. Konjo/Selayar ''bahine'' ('female'), ''uhuʔ'' ('hair') vs. Makassarese ''baine'', ''uʔ''. In Konjo languages, some initial ''b'' appears as .

Lexical differences

References

External links

Makassar languages
at ''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

'' (23rd ed., 2020). {{Austronesian languages Languages of Sulawesi South Sulawesi languages

Languages

Phonology

Lexical differences

See also

References

External links