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Ngadha language

Language in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

Summary

Language in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia

Field	Value
name	Ngadha
nativename	Bahasa Ngadha
states	Indonesia
region	Flores
ethnicity	Ngada
speakers	ca. 65,000
date	1994–1995
ref	e18
familycolor	Austronesian
fam2	Malayo-Polynesian
fam3	Central–Eastern MP
fam4	Sumba–Flores
fam5	Ende–Manggarai
fam6	Central Flores
fam7	Ngadha–Soa
lc1	nxg	ld1=Ngada
lc2	nea	ld2=Eastern Ngada
glotto	ngad1261
glottorefname	Ngad'a

Ngadha (, also spelled Ngada, Ngada or 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 languages form the proposed Central Flores group of the Sumba–Flores languages, according to Blust (2009).

Djawanai (1983) precises that Ngadha somewhat deviates from Austronesian norms, in that words do not have clear cognates and the grammatical processes are different; for example, the Austronesian family of languages makes an abundant use of prefixes or suffixes (which form new words by adding extensions either before or after root-words, such as [per-]form or child[-hood]), whereas the Ngadha language uses no prefixes or suffixes.

Ngadha is one of the few languages with a retroflex implosive .

Phonology

The sound system of Ngadha is as follows.

Vowels

Front	Central	Back	High	Mid	Low

The short vowel is written followed by a double consonant, since phonetically a consonant becomes geminate after . It is never stressed and does not form sequences with other vowels except where glottal stop has dropped (e.g. limaessa 'six', from lima 'five' and 'essa 'one').

Within vowel sequences, epenthetic may appear after an unrounded vowel (e.g. in , ) and after a rounded vowel (e.g. in , ). Double vowels are sequences. Vowels tend to be voiceless between voiceless consonants and pre-pausa after voiceless consonants.

Stress is on the penultimate syllable, unless that contains the vowel , in which case stress is on the final syllable.

Consonants

Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palato-
alveolar	Retroflex	Velar	Glottal	Nasal	Plosive/
Affricate	unaspirated	aspirated	implosive	Fricative	voiced	voiceless	Liquid	lateral	trill

The implosives have been spelled , and . The velar fricatives are spelled .

The trill is short, and may have only one or two contacts.

Glottal stop contrasts with zero in initial position, as in inu 'drink', or 'inu 'tiny'. In rapid speech it tends to drop intervocalically.

Phonetically words are analyzed as having an initial schwa. In initial position the consonant is always voiced (otherwise the schwa remains). Examples are emma 'father', emmu 'mosquito', enna 'sand', Ennga (name), ebba 'swadling sling', ebbu 'grandparents', Ebbo (name), erro 'sun' – also in medial position with voiceless consonants, as in limaessa 'six'.

References

(1985). "Comparative Austronesian Dictionary: An Introduction to Austronesian Studies". Mouton De Gruyter.
"Introduction".
Blust, Robert. (2008). "Is There a Bima-Sumba Subgroup?". Oceanic Linguistics.
Peter ten Hoopen. "Ikat from Ngadha, Indonesia". Online Museum of Indonesian ikat textiles, curator: Dr Peter Ten Hoopen.
Djawanai, Stephanus. (1983). "Ngadha Text Tradition: The Collective Mind of the Ngadha People, Flores". Australian National University.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

languages-of-indonesia sumba-languages flores-island-(indonesia) isolating-languages

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