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Tukang Besi is an Austronesian language spoken in the Tukangbesi Islands in southeast Sulawesi in Indonesia by a quarter million speakers. A Tukang Besi pidgin is used in the area.

Phonology

The northern dialect of Tukang Besi has 25 consonant phonemes and a basic 5-vowel system. It features stress which is usually on the second-to-last syllable. The language has two implosive consonants, which are uncommon in the world's languages. The coronal plosives and /s/ have prenasalized counterparts which act as separate phonemes.

Notes:

• /b/ only appears in loanwords, but it contrasts with /ɓ/
• and are not phonemic and appear only as allophones of /dʒ/, which appears only in loanwords.

Orthography

Vowels

• a –
• e –
• i –
• o –
• u –

Consonants

• b –
• b̠ –
• c –
• d –
• d̠ –
• g –
• h –
• j –
• k –
• l –
• m –
• mb –
• mp –
• n –
• nd –
• ns –
• nt –
• ng –
• ngg –
• ngk –
• nj –
• p –
• r –
• s –
• t –
• w –
• ' –

Grammar

Nouns

Tukang Besi does not have grammatical gender or number. It is an ergative–absolutive language.

Verbs

Tukang Besi has an inflectional future tense, which is indicated with a prefix, but no past tense.

Word order

Tukang Besi uses verb–object–subject word order, which is also used by Fijian. Like many Austronesian languages, it has prepositions, but places adjectives, genitives, and determiners after nouns. Yes–no questions are indicated by a particle at the end of the sentence.

References

1. Tukang Besi North at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
   Tukang Besi South at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Donohue, Mark (1996). "Some trade languages of insular South-East Asia and Irian Jaya". In Wurm, Stephen A.; Mühlhäusler, Peter; Tryon, Darrell T. (eds.). Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 713–716.
3. ^ Donohue, Mark (1999). "Tukang Besi". Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press. pp. 151–53. ISBN 0-521-65236-7.
4. "Tukang Besi language". Omniglot. Retrieved 30 November 2021.
5. Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (2013). "Language Tukang Besi". The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved 27 February 2021.

Further reading

• Donohue, Mark (1995). The Tukang Besi Language of Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia (Ph.D. thesis). The Australian National University. doi:10.25911/5D70F30ACBE63. hdl:1885/136142.
• Donohue, Mark (1999). A Grammar of Tukang Besi. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110805543.
• Donohue, Mark (2000). "Tukang Besi dialectology". In Grimes, C.E. (ed.). Spices from the East: Papers in languages of Eastern Indonesia. Pacific Linguistics No. 503. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 55–72. doi:10.15144/PL-503.55. hdl:1885/146101.

• Muna–Buton languages
• Languages of Sulawesi
• Southeast Sulawesi