Indonesian

Last Updated: 2020-06-05

SLIGHTLY COMPROMISED: conflation between /e/ and /ə/

Background

Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Western Malayo-Polynesian / Sundic / Malayic / Malayan / Local Malay

Phonology

Consonants

• /f/, /z/, /x/, and /ʃ/ only appear in loanwords, but due to major influence, they have phonemic status in the language (Tadmor 2009, 795).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d			k ɡ
Affricates			tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f	s z	ʃ		x	h
Nasals	m	n		ɲ	ŋ
Trills		r
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: Where two phonemes share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Some sources present diphthongs. For example, Soderberg and Olson (2008) list /ai/, /oi/, and /au/. However, adjacent vowels don’t typically form complex nuclei (Tadmor 2009, 796), so I have opted not to account for them.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Low		a

Alphabet

• The language is somewhat compromised as ⟨e⟩ can represent both /e/ and /ə/. Sometimes ⟨é⟩ is used to represent /e/ to disambiguate (which is represented in the rules), but this is not always the case. The rules transcribe ⟨e⟩ to /e/ by default (Soderberg and Olson 2008, 211).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
c	/tʃ/
d	/d/
e	/e/; /ə/	/e/: default in the rules
é	/e/
f	/f	only appears in loanwords - varies freely with [p]
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/
i	/i/
j	/dʒ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
q	/k/	only appears in loanwords
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
v	/f/	only appears in loanwords - varies freely with [v]
w	/w/
x	/ks/	only appears in loanwords
y	/j/
z	/z/	only appears in loanwords
Digraph
ng	/ŋ/
ny	/ɲ/
kh	/x/	only appears in loanwords - replaced with /k/ in younger generations (Soderberg and Olson 2008, 211)
sy	/ʃ/	only appears in loanwords

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Indonesian follow the order of (C)V(C) (Tadmor 2009, 796).

Lenition Rules

• /k/ is realized as a glottal stop syllable finally (Soderberg and Olson 2008, 211).

Misc. Rules

• Epenthesis of glottal stop occurs depending on loanword origin (e.g. Arabic) and affixation (Soderberg and Olson 2008, 211).
• Word-final voiced stops become voiceless in loanwords (voiced stops word-finally aren’t present in native words) (ibid.).
• Affix-final /ŋ/ assimilates to the place of articulation of the following root-initial consonant.

References

Soderberg, Craig D, and Kenneth S Olson. 2008. “Indonesian.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38 (2). Cambridge University Press: 209–13.

Tadmor, Uri. 2009. “Malay-Indonesian.” The World’s Major Languages. Routledge London, 791–818.