Balinese language

Balinese is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by 3.3 million people () on the Indonesian island of Bali, as well as Northern Nusa Penida, Western Lombok, Eastern Java, Southern Sumatra, and Sulawesi. Most Balinese speakers also know Indonesian. The Bali Cultural Agency estimated in 2011 that the number of people still using the Balinese language in their daily lives on the Bali Island is under 1 million. The language has been classified as "not endangered" by Glottolog. The higher registers of the language borrow extensively from Javanese: an old form of classical Javanese, Kawi, is used in Bali as a religious and ceremonial language. Balinese is an Austronesian language belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family. Within Malayo-Polynesian, it is part of the Bali–Sasak–Sumbawa subgroup. Internally, Balinese has three distinct varieties; Highland Bali, Lowland Bali and Nusa Penida. According to the 2000 census, Balinese language is spoken by 3.3 million people in Indonesia, mainly concentrated on the island of Bali and the surrounding areas. In 2011, the Bali Cultural Agency estimated that the number of people still using the Balinese language in their daily lives on the Bali Island does not exceed 1 million, as in urban areas their parents only introduce the Indonesian language or even English as a foreign language, while daily conversations in the institutions and the mass media have disappeared. The written form of the Balinese language is increasingly unfamiliar and most Balinese people use the Balinese language only as a means of oral communication, often mixing it with Indonesian in their daily speech. But in the transmigration areas outside Bali Island, the Balinese language is extensively used and believed to play an important role in the survival of the language. The official spelling denotes both /a/ and /ə/ by . However, is usually pronounced [ə] when it ends a word, and [ə] occurs also in prefixes ma-, pa- and da-. Depending on dialect, the phoneme /t/ is realized as a voiceless alveolar or retroflex stop.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (16)

Javanese language

Javanese (dʒɑːvəˈniːz, dʒæv-, -ˈniːs; basa Jawa, Aksara Jawa: , Pegon: , IPA: bɔsɔ d͡ʒɔwɔ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the Javanese people from the central and eastern parts of the island of Java, Indonesia. There are also pockets of Javanese speakers on the northern coast of western Java. It is the native language of more than 98 million people. Javanese is the largest of the Austronesian languages in number of native speakers. It has several regional dialects and a number of clearly distinct status styles.

Javanese script

The Javanese script (natively known as Aksara Jawa, Hanacaraka, Carakan, and Dentawyanjana) is one of Indonesia's traditional scripts developed on the island of Java. The script is primarily used to write the Javanese language, but in the course of its development has also been used to write several other regional languages such as Sundanese, Madurese, and Sasak; the lingua franca of the region, Malay; as well as the historical languages Kawi and Sanskrit.

Old Javanese

Old Javanese or Kawi (poet, कवि) is the oldest attested phase of the Javanese language. It was spoken in the eastern part of what is now Central Java and the whole of East Java, Indonesia. As a literary language, Kawi was used across Java and on the islands of Madura, Bali and Lombok. It had a sizable vocabulary of Sanskrit loanwords but had not yet developed the formal krama language register, to be used with one's social superiors that is characteristic of modern Javanese.