Bima language
The Bima language, or Bimanese (Bima: Nggahi Mbojo, Indonesian: Bahasa Bima) is an Austronesian language spoken on the eastern half of Sumbawa Island, Indonesia, which it shares with speakers of the Sumbawa language. Bima territory includes the Sanggar Peninsula, where the extinct Papuan language Tambora was once spoken. "Bima" is an exonym; the autochthonous name for the territory is "Mbojo" and the language is referred to as "Nggahi Mbojo." There are over half a million Bima speakers. Neither the Bima nor the Sumbawa people have alphabets of their own for they use the alphabets of the Bugis and the Malay language indifferently.[3]
Bima | |
---|---|
Nggahi Mbojo | |
Native to | Indonesia |
Region | Sumbawa |
Native speakers | (500,000 cited 1989)[1] |
Dialects |
|
Latin, Mbojo | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | bhp |
Glottolog | bima1247 [2] |
Long thought to be closely related to the languages of Sumba Island to the southeast, this assumption has been refuted by Blust (2008), which makes Bima a primary branch within the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroup.[4]
Dialects
Dialects include Kolo, Sangar (Sanggar), Toloweri, Bima, and Mbojo (Ethnologue).
Donggo, spoken in mountainous regions to the west of Bima Bay such as in Doro Ntika of the Doro Oromboha area, is closely related to the main dialect of Bima. It is spoken by about 25,000 people who were formerly primarily Christians and animists; many have now converted to Islam.[5]
Distribution
Bima is spoken on Sumbawa, Banta, Sangeang, and Komodo islands (Ethnologue).
References
- Bima at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Bima". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- James Cowles Prichard (1874). Researches into the Physical History of Mankind Volume 5: Containing Researches Into the History of the Oceanic and of the American Nations. Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper. ASIN B0041T3N9G.
- Blust, R. (2008). Is There a Bima-Sumba Subgroup? Oceanic Linguistics, 47(1), 45-113.
- Just, Peter. 2001. Dou Donggo justice: conflict and morality in an Indonesian society. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
External links
- Paradisec has a collection of open access recordings of Bima from a 2005 language documentation class, as well as some recordings from Robert Blust.
- Kaipuleohone also has an open-access collection of Robert Blust's materials including a recording of Bima.