Melanau is an

Austronesian Austronesian may refer to: *The Austronesian languages *The historical Austronesian peoples The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, M ...

language spoken in the coastal area of the Rajang delta on northwest Borneo,

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, ...

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

and

Brunei Brunei ( , ), formally Brunei Darussalam ( ms, Negara Brunei Darussalam, Jawi alphabet, Jawi: , ), is a country located on the north coast of the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia. Apart from its South China Sea coast, it is completely sur ...

. There are several dialects—Mukah-Oya, Balingian, Bruit, Dalat, Lawas, Igan, Sarikei, Segahan, Prehan, Segalang, and Siteng.

Phonology

Consonants

Melanau has the following consonants.Clayre 1970.

Vowels

Melanau has the following vowels. Sounds can have allophones of

~ The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...

Orthography

Vowels and diphthongs

* a – * aa – * e – * i – * o – * u – * ai – * au – * ei – * ou – * ui –

Consonants

* b – * c – * d – * g – * h – * j – * k – * l – * m – * n – * ng – * ny – * p – * r – * s – * t – * w – * y –

Notes

References

*I.F.C.S. Clayre. 1970. "The Spelling of Melanau (nee Milano)," ''The Sarawak Museum Journal'' 18:330-352. *Clayre, Iain F. C. S. 1972. A grammatical description of Melanau. University of Edinburgh. *Rensch, Calvin R. 2012
''Melanau and the Languages of Central Sarawak''
SIL Electronic Survey Report. SIL International.

External links

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 ...

holds two open access collections that include Balingian language materials ( RB1-002 and RB2-003-E) as well as notebook pages of stories * {{DEFAULTSORT:Melanau Language Languages of Brunei Languages of Malaysia Melanau–Kajang languages