Semai () is a Austroasiatic language of western

Malaysia Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...

spoken by about 60,438 Semai people. It is one of the few

Aslian languages The Aslian languages () are the southernmost branch of Austroasiatic languages spoken on the Malay Peninsula. They are the languages of many of the ''Orang Asli'', the aboriginal inhabitants of the peninsula. The total number of native speakers o ...

which are not endangered, and even has 2,000 monolingual speakers. It is currently spoken by 3 main groups; the Northern Semai, Central Semai and the Southern Semai.

Phonology

One notable aspect of Semai

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

is its highly irregular pattern of expressive

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...

, showing discontiguous copying from just the edges of the reduplicant's base, thus forming a minor

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

Vowels

Consonants

Examples

Examples of words in Semai include the following:

In popular culture

* ''Asli'' (2017), a film directed by David Liew, is about a bi-racial girl on a road to discover her cultural heritage, is the first film to use the Semai language in 50% of its dialogue.

References

*Diffloth, Gerard. 1976a. Minor-Syllable Vocalism in Senoic Languages. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.), ''Austroasiatic Studies, Part I'', 229–247. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press. *Diffloth, Gerard. 1976b. Expressives in Semai. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.), ''Austroasiatic Studies, Part I'', 249–264. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press. *Hendricks, Sean. 2001. Bare-Consonant Reduplication Without Prosodic Templates: Expressive Reduplication in Semai. ''Journal of East Asian Linguistics'' 10: 287–306. *Phillips, Timothy C. 2013. Linguistic Comparison of Semai Dialects. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2013-010: 1–111.

External links

* http://projekt.ht.lu.se/rwaai RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage) * http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-66BF-5@view Semai in RWAAI Digital Archive
Semai dictionary of SIL International
– online version accessible from Webonary.org Languages of Malaysia Aslian languages {{Malaysia-stub