Acehnese, the language spoken by the Acehnese people of Aceh, Indonesia, has a large vowel inventory compared to Indonesian, with ten oral monophthong vowels, twelve oral diphthongs, seven nasal monophthong vowels, and five nasal diphthongs.
Vowels
Native-speaking linguists divide vowels in Acehnese into several categories: oral monophthongs, oral diphthongs (which are further divided into the ones ending with /ə/ and with /i/), nasal monophthongs, and nasal diphthongs.
Oral vowels
Oral monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.
Oral diphthong vowels ending with /ə/ are shown in the table below.
Oral diphthong vowels ending with /i/ are shown in the table below.
Nasal vowels
Nasal monophthong vowels in Acehnese are shown in the table below.
Consonants
The table below shows the Acehnese consonant phonemes and the range of their realizations.
Notes:
- Syllable-final k always represents /ʔ/ save in certain recent loans
- /f/, /z/, and /ʃ/ are borrowed sounds, and are often replaced by /ph/, /d/, and /ch/ respectively
- The nasals /m/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/ are realized as post-stopped nasals (also called "funny nasals") before oral vowels and consonants. They are distinct from the nasal-stop sequences /mb/, /nd/, /ɲɟ/, /ŋɡ/, e.g. in /banᵈa/ 'port' vs /mandum/ 'all'. The orthography does not distinguish these sounds.
Orthography
The orthography of Achenese features 31 letters: the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, è, é, ë, ô, and ö.
Notes
References
- Asyik, Abdul Gani (1982). "The Agreement System in Acehnese" (PDF). Mon-Khmer Studies. 11: 1–33. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 February 2012.
- Asyik, Abdul Gani (1987). A Contextual Grammar of Acehnese Sentences (PDF) (PhD thesis). The University of Michigan. Archived from the original on 24 July 2011.
- Durie, Mark (1984). A grammar of Acehnese (PhD thesis). Australian National University. doi:10.25911/5d6fa25bcc31c. hdl:1885/138059.
- Lawler, John M. (1977). "A Agrees with B in Achenese: A Problem for Relational Grammar". In Cole, P.; Sacock, J. (eds.). Grammatical Relations. Syntax and Semantics 8. New York: Academic Press. pp. 219–248. doi:10.1163/9789004368866_010.
- Pillai, Stefanie; Yusuf, Yunisrina Qismullah (2012). "An Instrumental Analysis of Acehnese Oral Vowels" (PDF). Language and Linguistics. 13 (6): 1029–1050. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 31 October 2014.
