Sasak language

Speakers

Sasak is spoken by the ethnic Sasak on the island of Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, located between the island of Bali to the west and Sumbawa to the East. In 2010, its speakers number around 2.7 million, roughly 85% of the population of Lombok. It is used in family and village domains, but has no formal status. The national language Indonesian serves as the language of education, government and literacy as well as interethnic communication. Sasak is not the only ethnic group in Lombok; notably, around 300,000 ethnic Balinese lives mostly in the western part of the island and near the Mataram, the provincial capital of West Nusa Tenggara. In urban areas, where there is more ethnic diversity, there is some language shift towards Indonesian, but it was mostly in the form of code-switching and mixing, not a total stop of Sasak use.

Classification and related languages

A 2005 classification by Austronesian linguist K. Alexander Adelaar puts Sasak in the Malayo-Sumbawan group (a group first idenfied by Adelaar in the same paper) of the Western Malayo-Polynesian family.

Sasak's closest sister language is Sumbawa language, and together with Balinese they form the Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa (BSS) subgroup. BSS together with Malayic (which includes Malay, Indonesian and Minangkabau) and Chamic (which includes Acehnese) form one branch of Malayo-Sumbawan. The two other branches are Sundanese and Madurese. This classification puts Javanese, which were previously thought to belong to the same group, to be outside the Malayo-Sumbawan group; it is rather in a different branch of Western Malayo-Polynesian family.

Kawi, a literary language based on Old Javanese has a significant influence on Sasak. It is used in Sasak puppet theatre, poetry and some of the lontar-based texts, sometimes in a mixture with Sasak. Kawi is also used for hyperpoliteness (a speech level above the "high" register of Sasak), especially by the upper class known as the mènak.

Vowels

Eight phonological vowels appear across the dialects of Sasak. The vowels contrast with each other differently in the different dialects. They are represented in Latin orthography by five different vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, with diacritics sometimes used to distinguish conflated sounds. The usual Indonesianist practices use e for the schwa, é for the close-mid front vowel, è for the open-mid front vowel, ó for the close-mid back vowel and ò for the open-mid back vowel.

Diphthongs

Sasak has the diphthongs (two vowels combined in the same syllable) /ae/, /ai/, /au/, /ia/, /uə/ and /oe/.

Words

Phonologically, Sasak words have a single stress on the final syllable. Roots that end in /a/ changed to a tense schwa (mid central vowel) in word-final position. For example the word bace, 'read' comes from the root baca (as in bacaan, 'reading' and pembacaan, 'reading instrument'). If the first element of a compound word ends in a vowel, the element will take a nasal linker (/n/ in most dialects, also /ŋ/ in some). For example, maten bulu, 'eyelash' comes from mate, 'eye' and bulu, 'hair'.

Grammar

Sasak has a flexible word order typical of Indonesian Western Austronesian (WAN) languages (WAN). The frequency distributions are influenced by the form of verb involved. Clauses involving the nasal verb form are predominantly subject-verb-object (SVO), similar to actor focus classes in other Indonesian WAN languagess. In contrast, clauses with the unmarked verb form do not have a dominant word order, four of the six possible orders: subject-verb-object, verb-subject-object and object-verb-subject occur with roughly equal frequency.

Sasak verbs, like those of other Western Indonesian languages, are not conjugated for tense, mood, or aspect. All affixations are derivational. Verbs can appear in two forms: the unmarked form (also called basic or oral form) and the nasal form. The basic form is the form that appears in vocabulary elicitation and dictionaries, and the nasal form adds a nasal prefix n-. The nasal prefix also appears as nge-, m-, and others, and can delete the first consonant of the basic form. For example, the unmarked form for "to buy" is beli and the nasal form is mbeli. The nasal prefix can also be used to turn a noun into the corresponding verb, for example kupi ("coffee") into ngupi ("to drink coffee"). The way the nasal form are derived from the basic form, and the function of the prefix, differ across the regional varieties of Sasak. For example, the eastern varieties of Sasak has three types of nasalization - the first marks transitive verbs, the second is used for predicate focus, the third for a durative action with a non-specific patient. Imperative and hortative sentences use the basic form.

Sasak also has a variety of clitics, a grammatical unit that is pronounced attached to a word, like an affix, but served the syntactic role of an independent word (similar to the clitic 'll in English). Simple clitics occur in demonstrative specifier attached to a previous noun or noun phrase, for example, the clitic ni('this') in dengan ni, 'this person'. Special clitics occur with nouns to encode inalienable possession, and with other hosts to encode agents and patients. For example, possessive clitic ku (or kò, or k, depending on dialects), which means 'my' and corresponds to the pronoun aku ('I'), can attach to the noun ime ('hand') forming imengku ('my hand').

Regional

Sasak shows significant regional variations, including in phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Native speakers recognize five labelled dialects, named according to how they say "like that" and "like this": Kutó-Kuté (predominant in North Sasak), Nggetó-Nggeté (Northeast Sasak), Menó-Mené (Central Sasak), Ngenó-Ngené (Central East Sasak, Central West Sasak) and Meriaq-Meriku (Central South Sasak). However, linguist Peter K. Austin said that the five labels do not "reflect fully the extensive geographical variation ... found within Sasak" in many linguistic areas. Some of the dialects have low mutual intelligibility.

Speech levels

Sasak has a system of speech levels, where different words are used depending on the social level of the addressee in relation to the speaker. The system is similar to that of Balinese and Javanese, languages spoken in neighbouring islands, and outside Indonesia is comparable to speech levels found in Korean. There are three levels: low, mid, high marking the status of the addressee. Additionally, there is an additional humble-honorific dimension that marks the relation between the speaker and some other referent. For example, the pronoun "you" can be expressed as kamu (low level), side (mid), pelinggih (high) or dekaji (honorific). The verb "to eat" can be mangan (low), bekelór (mid), madaran (high) or majengan (honorific).

All non-low forms are referred in Sasak as alus ("smooth" or "polite"). They are used in formal contexts and with social superiors, especially in situations involving mènak (the traditional upper caste forming 8% of the population). The system is observed in the regional varieties of Sasak. Additionally, while low-level terms show large regional variations, the same non-low forms are used across all varieties. Linguist of Indonesian languages Bernd Nothofer argued that the system was a borrowing from Balinese and/or Javanese.

Literature

The Sasaks has a long tradition of writing on the dried leaves of the lontar palm. The Javanese Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire, whose influence included Lombok, likely introduced literacy to the island during the fourteenth century. The oldest surviving lontar texts date from the nineteenth century; many were collected by the Dutch and kept in libraries in Leiden, The Netherlands or Bali, Indonesia. Additionally, the Mataram Museum in Lombok has a collection, and many individuals and families in Lombok keep them as heirlooms handed between generations.

The lontar texts are still read today in reading performances called pepaòsan. Such readings are done in a wide range of occasions, including funerals, weddings, circumcision ceremonies. Sasaks in rural areas also read the lontar texts as part of a process to ensure fertility of farm animals. Austin witnessed, recorded and described a pepaòsan performed as part of a circumcision ceremony in 2002. This performance was done using paper copies of lontar texts, rather than actual lontar palm leaves.

The lontar texts of Lombok are written in not only Sasak, but also Kawi - a literary language based on old Javanese - or a mixture of the two. They are written in a hanacaraka script nearly identical to the Balinese script. The script's basic letters consist of a consonant plus the vowel a. The first five letters reads ha, na, ca, ra, ka, hence the name of the script. Syllables with vowels other than a use the basic letter plus diacritics above, below, or around it. There are also means for encoding final consonants of a syllable, or consonant clusters.