Rongga is a language of central Flores, in

East Nusa Tenggara East Nusa Tenggara ( id, Nusa Tenggara Timur – NTT; pt, Sonda Oriental) is the southernmost province of Indonesia. It comprises the eastern portion of the Lesser Sunda Islands, facing the Indian Ocean in the south and the Flores Sea in the nor ...

Province,

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 Guine ...

. Rongga is closely related to

Ngadha Ngadha (, previously spelled Ngada) is an Austronesian language, one of six languages spoken in the central stretch of the Indonesian island of Flores. From west to east these languages are Ngadha, Nage, Keo, Ende, Lio, and Palu'e. These langu ...

, and more distantly to Manggarai. Arka, I Wayan (2005). ‘Challenges and Prospect of Maintaining Rongga: A Preliminary Ethnographic Report’, in Ilana Mushin (ed.), Proceedings of the (2004) Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. Locally, it is considered part of the Manggarai culture, however its closer linguistic relatives include

and Lio, both belonging to the Central Flores subgroup. Typologically, it is an

isolating language An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages ...

. Like other Central Flores languages, it uses elements of a base-5 numeral system, possibly exhibiting the influence of a hypothetical Papuan

linguistic substratum In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or sup ...

. When written, it is spelled with Indonesian-like orthographic conventions. Digraphs such as ''zh'', ''dh'' and ''bh'' are used to record sounds specific to this language.

References

Bibliography

* Sumba languages Languages of Indonesia {{au-lang-stub