ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 41: Madurese Madurese is the language spoken on Madura isla
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 41: Madurese Madurese is the language spoken on Madura island, an part of Indonesian right of the coast of the much larger island of Java. Madurese is an Austronesian language, more specifically a Western Malayo-Polynesian one, making it a relative to almost all the languages of Indonesia, a distant cousin of all the Polynesian languages and Madagscar’s Malagasy, and a very distant relation of the native languages of Taiwan (now mostly routed by Chinese). Madurese has an unusually high consonant count by the low standards of Austronesian languages. This is largely due to a three way distinction pattern in stop consonants (voiced, voiceless, and aspirated voiceless) and a full series of retroflex consonants. Though immediately adjacent to the Javanese speaking people of Java it is not a direct sister. It is more closely related to Balinese, spoken on an island some 300 miles to the southeast. -- source link