Makassarese language


Makassarese, sometimes spelled Makasar, Makassar, or Macassar, is a language of the Makassarese people, spoken in South Sulawesi province of Indonesia. It is a member of the South Sulawesi group of the Austronesian language family, and thus closely related to, among others, Buginese.

Phonology

The following description of Makassarese phonology is based on Jukes.

Vowels

Makassarese has five vowels: a, e, i, o, u.

Consonants

All consonants except for can appear in initial position. In final position, only and are found.
Consonant clusters only occur medially and can be analyzed as clusters of or + consonant. These clusters also arise through sandhi across morpheme boundaries.
The geminate cluster /rr/ is only found in root-internal position and cannot be accounted for by the above rules.
Sequences of like vowels are contracted to a single vowel, e.g. sassa "to wash" + -ang 'nominalizing suffix' > sassáng "laundry", ca'di "small" + -i 'third person' > ca'di "it is small".

Current writing systems

Although Makassarese is now often written in Latin script, it is still widely written using Lontara script, which once was used also to write important documents in Bugis and Mandar, two related languages from Sulawesi.

Examples

Some common words/phrases in the Makassar language, transcribed in the Latin script, are as follows :
LontaraRomanizedIndonesianTranslation
balla'rumahhouse
bulubulubody hair/fur
bambangpanashot/warm
cipuru'laparhungry
doe'uangmoney
iyoiyayes
lompobesarbig/large
sallolama / lambatslow / long
tabe'permisiexcuse me
tenatidak adanone
karaengrajaking
apa kareba?apa kabar?how are you?
lakeko mae?kamu mau ke mana?where are you going?
ballangbelangget tanned
botto'bausmelly
rantasa'jorokdisgusting
co'mo'gemukfatty
bellajauhfar away
gele'-gele'gelitickle
kongkonganjingdog
jarangkudahorse
bembe'kambinggoat
ammotere'pulang ke rumahreturn home
angnganremakaneat

Historical writing system

Makassarese was historically written using Makasar script.
In Makassarese the script is known as ukiri' jangang-jangang or huruf jangang-jangang.
It was used for official purposes in the kingdoms of Makasar in the 17th century but ceased to be used by the 19th century, being replaced by Lontara script.
In spite of their quite distinctive appearance, both the Makasar and Lontara scripts are derived from the ancient Brahmi script of India. Like other descendants of that script, each consonant has an inherent vowel "a", which is not marked. Other vowels can be indicated by adding diacritics above, below, or on either side of each consonant.
. The palláwa punctuation signs, typical of this script, are drawn and colored in red, as well as a few proper names and some inserts in Arabic.

Unicode

Makasar script was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2018 with the release of version 11.0.
The Unicode block for Makasar is U+11EE0–U+11EFF and contains 25 characters: