Tukang Besi, or known in Indonesia by the terms Pulo or Wakatobi, 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 in the

Tukangbesi Islands Tukangbesi Islands, is a group of islands off the coast of Sulawesi immediately east of Buton island in the Banda Sea region, and part of Sulawesi Tenggara. The main islands are Wangiwangi Island, Wangiwangi Island, Kaledupa Island, Tomia Island, ...

in southeast

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, ...

by a quarter million speakers. A Tukang Besi pidgin is used in the area.

Phonology

The northern dialect of Tukang Besi has 25 consonant

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s and a basic 5-vowel system. It features stress which is usually on the second-to-last syllable. The language has two

implosive consonant Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in additi ...

s, which are uncommon in the world's languages. The coronal plosives and have prenasalized counterparts which act as separate phonemes. Tukang Besi vowel chart

Notes: * only appears in loanwords, but it contrasts with * and are not phonemic and appear only as

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

s of , which appears only in loanwords.

Orthography

Vowels

* a – * e – * i – * o – * u –

Consonants

* b – * b̠ – * c – * d – * d̠ – * g – * h – * j – * k – * l – * m – * mb – * mp – * n – * nd – * ns – * nt – * ng – * ngg – * ngk – * nj – * p – * r – * s – * t – * w – * ' –

Grammar

Nouns

Tukang Besi does not have grammatical gender or number. It is an ergative–absolutive language.

Verbs

Tukang Besi has an inflectional future tense, which is indicated with a prefix, but no past tense.

Word order

Tukang Besi uses verb–object–subject word order, which is also used by Fijian. Like many Austronesian languages, it has prepositions, but places adjectives, genitives, and determiners after nouns. Yes–no questions are indicated by a particle at the end of the sentence.