Makassar languages


The Makassar languages are a group of languages spoken in the southern part of South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, and make up one of the branches of the South Sulawesi subgroup in the Austronesian language family. The most prominent member of this group is Makassarese, with over two million speakers in the city of Makassar and neighboring areas.
The status of the Makassar languages, other than Makassarese, as distinct languages is not universally accepted. In older classifications, as well as in recent studies by local linguists, they are considered to be dialects of the Makassarese language.

Languages

  • Makassarese
  • Bentong
  • Coastal Konjo
  • Highland Konjo
  • Selayar

    Phonology

A characteristic feature of the Makassar languages is the occurrence of echo vowels with stems ending in final, or. E.g. 'bottle' is realized as bótolo in Selayar and Coastal Konjo, and as bótoloʔ in Makassarese and Highland Konjo. This echo vowel is dropped if a suffix is added, but retained if followed by an enclitic.
MakassareseSelayar
base
rántasaʔ
'dirty'
lámbusu
'straight'
with suffix +
rantás-aŋ
'dirtier'		 +
lambús-aŋ
'straighter'
with enclitic + /=aʔ/
rántasak=aʔ
'I am dirty'		 + /=a/
lámbusu=a
'I am straight'

Konjo, Bentong, Selayar and the Labbakkang dialect of Makassarese have j and where Makassarese has y and. In some words, Coastal/Highland Konjo and Selayar have h corresponding to zero in Makassarese, e.g. Konjo/Selayar bahine, uhuʔ vs. Makassarese baine, uʔ.
In Konjo languages, some initial b appears as.
MakassareseKonjoSelayar
to look, findboyahojaboja
hotbambanghambangbambang

Lexical differences