Mamasa

Last Updated: 2020-07-01

Background

Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Western Malayo-Polynesian / Sulawesi / South Sulawesi / Northern / Toraja-Sa’dan

• Mamasa is spoken in the South Sulawesi and West Sulawesi provinces of Indonesia.

Phonology

Consonants

• Voiceless stops, nasals, /s/, /l/, and /r/ geminate (Matti 1991, 57).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d		k ɡ	ʔ
Fricatives		s
Nasals	m	n		ŋ
Trills		r
Approximants	w	l	j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Vowel length is not considered to be a phonemic feature (Matti 1991, 58). Rather, adjacent like-vowels are interpreted separately with an intervening epenthetic glottal stop.
• Additionally, adjacent vowels do not constitute complex nuclei (ibid.).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
y	/j/
’	/ʔ/
Digraph
ng	/ŋ/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Mamasa follow the order of (C)V(C) (Matti 1991, 69).

Lenition Rules

• Stem-final /k/ debuccalizes to a glottal stop when followed by a non-back consonant (Matti 1991, 85).

Misc. Rules

• /t/ varies freely with [tʃ] [Matti (1991), p. 58].

References

Matti, David F. 1991. “Phonology of Mamasa.” In Sulawesi Phonologies, edited by Rene van den Berg, 12:53–97. Workpapers in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. Ujung Pandang: Summer Institute of Linguistics.