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Madurese is the spoken language of people from Madura island in Indonesia; it is also spoken on Kangean Islands, Sapudi Islands, and in parts of province of East Java. It is classified in the Sundic subgroup of the West Malayo-Polynesian group of the Austronesian languages family. It was traditionally written in the Javanese script, but the Roman script is now more commonly used. Number of speakers though shrinking are estimated to be 8-10 million.
Phonology and Morphology
Madurese has more consonants than its neighboring languages due to it having a voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced sounds. Similar to Javanese it has a contrast between dental and alveolar (even retroflex) stops. Nouns are not inflected in gender and are made plural via reduplication. Its basic word order is subject, verb, object. Negation is expressed by saying a negative word before the verb/adjective or before a noun phrase. As with other similar languages there are different negative words for different kinds of negation. The language is unusual that it does not have any phonemically high vowels.
Common Words
- Man: Lalake
- Woman: Babine
- Yes: iya
- No: enja
- Water: aeng
- Sun: are
- Good: tello'
"Madurese language"