Bunak language

Bunak
Native to Indonesia, East Timor
Region central Timor
Ethnicity Bunak
Native speakers
 76,000 (2010)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 bfn
Glottolog buna1278[3]
Distribution of Bunak in East Timor (West Timor not shown)

The Bunak language (also known as Bunaq, Buna', Bunake) is the language of the Bunak people of the mountainous region of central Timor, split between the political boundary between West Timor, Indonesia, particularly in Lamaknen District and East Timor. It is one of the few on Timor which is not an Austronesian language, but rather a Papuan language like groups on New Guinea. It is usually classified in the Trans–New Guinea language family. The language is surrounded by Malayo-Polynesian languages, like Uab Meto and Tetum.

Pronouns seem to tie Bunak more closely to the Alor–Pantar languages, in a group Ross (2005) calls "West Timor", than with the Papuan East Timor languages. The independent pronouns and object prefixes, which appear to retain the proto-Trans–New Guinea dual suffix *-li, are as follows:

sgdupl
1excl ne-to
n-		ne-li
n-		ne-i
n-
1incl i-li
∅-		i
∅-
2 e-to
∅-		e-li
∅-		e-i
∅-
3an himo
g-		–hala'i
g-
3inan homo

References

  1. ↑ Bunak at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ New Guinea World, West Bomberai
  3. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Bunak". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.