Sikka | |
---|---|
Native to | Indonesia |
Region | Flores |
Ethnicity | Sikka |
Native speakers | (180,000 cited 1995) [1] |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | ski |
Glottolog | sika1262 |
The Sikka language or Sikkanese, also known as Sika, [2] is spoken by around 180,000 people of the Sika ethnic group on Flores island in East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia. It is a member of the Central Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family.
Sikka is notable for being one of the few languages which contain a non-allophonic labiodental flap. Like many other languages in eastern Indonesia, it shows evidence of having a Papuan (non-Austronesian) substratum, but in the case of Sika, this includes extreme morphological simplification and about 20% lexical replacement in basic vocabulary. It has been hypothesized that the Austronesian languages in that area could be descendants of a creole language, resulting from the intrusion of Austronesian languages into eastern Indonesia. [3]
Sika has at least three recognized dialects:
Sika has the following consonant phonemes: [2]
Bilabial | Dental | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Plosive | Voiceless | p | t | k | ʔ | |
Voiced | b | d | g | |||
Fricative | Voiceless | s | h | |||
Voiced | β | |||||
Affricate | d͡ʒ | |||||
Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||
Lateral | l | |||||
Trill | r |
Sika has the following vowel phonemes: [2]
Front | Central | Back | |
---|---|---|---|
High | i | u | |
Mid | e | ə | o |
Low | a |
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