Madurese language

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Madurese Madhura, Basa Mathura
Spoken in:	Island of Madura, Sapudi Islands, northern coastal area of eastern Java, Singapore
Total speakers:	13,694,000 in Indonesia (1995)
Language family:	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian Sunda-Sulawesi Madurese
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`mad`
ISO 639-3:	`mad`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

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.

[edit] 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.