'Madurese' is the spoken language of people from
Madura Island in
Indonesia; it is also spoken on
Kangean Islands,
Sapudi Islands, and in eastern part 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.
It is closely related to the
Madurese people ethnicity.
==
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'