Balinese language

Balinese is an Austronesian language spoken on the Indonesian island of Bali, as well as Northern Nusa Penida, Western Lombok, Southern Sumatra, and Sulawesi. Most Balinese speakers also use Indonesian. The 2000 national census recorded 3.3 million people speakers of Balinese, however the Bali Cultural Agency estimated in 2011 that the number of people still using the Balinese language in their daily lives is under 1 million. The language has been classified as "not endangered" by Glottolog.
The higher registers of the language borrow extensively from Javanese: an old form of classical Javanese, Kawi, is used in Bali as a religious and ceremonial language.
Balinese is an Austronesian language belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family. Within Malayo-Polynesian, it is part of the Bali–Sasak–Sumbawa subgroup. Internally, Balinese has three distinct varieties; Highland Bali, Lowland Bali, and Nusa Penida Balinese.
According to the 2000 census, the Balinese language is spoken by 3.3 million people in Indonesia, mainly concentrated on the island of Bali and the surrounding areas.
In 2011, the Bali Cultural Agency estimated that the number of people still using the Balinese language in their daily lives on Bali Island does not exceed 1 million, as in urban areas their parents only introduce the Indonesian language or even English as a foreign language, while daily conversations in the institutions and the mass media have disappeared. The written form of the Balinese language is increasingly unfamiliar and most Balinese people use the Balinese language only as a means of oral communication, often mixing it with Indonesian in their daily speech. However, in the transmigration areas outside Bali Island, the Balinese language is extensively used and believed to play an important role in the survival of the language.
The official spelling denotes both /a/ and final /ə/ by ⟨a⟩. However, ⟨a⟩ is usually pronounced [ə] when it ends a word, and [ə] occurs also in prefixes ma-, pa- and da-. In non-final positions, /ə/ is denoted by ⟨e⟩.
Depending on dialect, the phoneme /t/ is realized as a voiceless alveolar or retroflex stop. This is in contrast with most other languages in western Indonesia (including Standard Indonesian), which have a dental /t/ patterning with an otherwise alveolar phoneme series.
Stress falls on the last syllable.
Even though most basic vocabulary in Balinese and Indonesian originates from Austronesian and Sanskrit, many cognates sound quite different between languages. Balinese has four different registers: low (basa kétah), middle (basa madiâ), and high (basa sínggíh), the uses of which depend on the relationship and status of those speaking and those being spoken about. High Balinese is not commonly used except to speak to pedandas, so few are fluent in it. The common mutations in inherited Balinese words are:
However, these mutations are not expressed in High Balinese, indicating that High Balinese contains many loanwords from Sanskrit and (Old) Javanese. These loanwords are identical in sound to their modern Javanese cognates, but reflect fifteenth-century usages from Old Javanese.
Balinese has a decimal numeral system, but this is complicated by numerous words for intermediate quantities such as 45, 175, and 1600.
Kinship terms can be used as pronouns. If these pronouns are used as agents, they refer to either the speaker or the listener, depending on context. Though first and second person pronouns need no antecedent to be understood, third person pronouns do.
Instead of grammatical tense, Balinese uses temporal adverbs to talk about time.
For present tense, the adverb jani ("now") can be either definite or indefinite depending on context. Its more emphatic form, jani san ("right now"), is definite. The indefinite word ajanian ("up to now") refers to any time before or during the utterance.
The word buin/bin ("again") is obligatory for puan and telun to clarify that they are not being used for their past tense meanings. Mani, manian, and puan can all be prefixed with mani to refer to the future.
Balinese is agglutinative. Verb and noun inflectional morphology is similarly minimal to Indonesian, but derivational morphology is extensive.
Of the two dative suffixes, -ang and -in, the latter should be used if the object is animate. The suffix -né / -é marks nouns for both definiteness and possession.
Nouns come before their modifiers, and are often marked with a deictic word, ento 'that' or ené 'this,'" to show that any modifiers act as modifiers instead of as verbs. The definite marker can also be attached to modifiers, especially any which conveys "an inherent property of its referent." Adjectives following possessive (and therefore definite) nouns function as predicative, while adjectives following unmarked nouns function as attributive.
Two types of serial verb constructions occur in Balinese. Both verbs are always fully inflected, but in the first type, the verbs have the same agent, whereas in the second, the object of the first verb is the subject of the second.
The word order is similar to that of Indonesian, and verb and noun inflectional morphology is similarly minimal. However, derivational morphology is extensive, and suffixes are applied to indicate definite or indefinite articles, and optionally to indicate possession.
The default, unmarked word order of Balinese is Patient Verb Agent. If the agent is a third person pronoun, it is attached to the verb as the clitic suffix -a.
This default word order can be reversed (Agent Verb Patient) with a nasal prefix on the verb. The nasal-marked word order cannot be an active construction, because it is marked, nor can it be antipassive, because the patient can't be omitted. It is considered a second type of transitive voice.
There is a true passive voice (Patient Verb Agent) borrowed from Javanese and marked by the verbal prefix ka-. It is used mostly in high registers. If the agent of this passive construction is third-person, it must be preceded by a preposition. If it is not third-person, it cannot be preceded by a preposition.
The second true passive voice (Patient Verb), marked by the verbal prefix ma-, always omits the agent. It connotes a complete event and is only available to some verbs.
Balinese has 2 main dialects, the Highland dialect and the Lowland dialect. The difference between the two dialects lies in the variety of vocabulary, phonology, and usage of register (e.g. High register vs. Low register). Highland dialect, also referred as Bali Aga dialect, has fewer high register variations, while the lowland dialect recognises both high register and low register.
The highland dialect, also known as Bali Aga [dialect] is a dialect of the Balinese language spoken by the Bali Aga people in mountainous areas and northern part of Bali, especially in the mountain range of Kintamani, and regencies nearby such as Bangli, Buleleng, and Karangasem, as well in Nusa Penida. According to Bawa (1983:394), the highland dialect is grouped into three main usage areas, namely the eastern, northern, and western regions which are detailed as follows:
Overall, there are two Highland sub-dialects that are distinct from varieties spoken in the area mentioned. Those sub-dialects are Nusa Penida dialect, spoken mostly in Nusa Penida, and Kapara dialect (also called as Bali Kapara) notably spoken in Sembiran village, Tejakula sub-regency, Buleleng Regency with an estimated 4,883 users. Nusa Penida dialect was thought to be a different dialect, but there is some indication that Nusa Penida dialect might be a sub-dialect of the highland dialect. According to Jendra, et al. (1997), both Nusa Penida and Highland dialects share the same phonological pattern as explained below:
However, there are other notable differences between the two dialects, namely the absence or reduction of the distribution of the phoneme /a/ in word-final positions.
Currently, the Nusa Penida dialect is widely used only in Nusa Penida in Klungkung Regency. However, it is important to note that not all communities in Nusa Penida use the Nusa Penida dialect. There are several groups of people who communicate using different dialects. On the islands of Nusa Lembongan and Nusa Ceningan, which are located next to Nusa Penida, as well as in a small part of Nusa Penida close to these islands, there is a distinct dialect that is quite different from the Nusa Penida dialect. One of the most striking differences is in words like eda (you) and kola (I) in the Nusa Penida dialect. Speakers of the Nusa Lembongan dialect use words like cai or ci (you) and cang (I). Another example is əndək (Nusa Penida dialect) and tusing (Nusa Lembongan dialect), geleng-cenik, hangken-kenken, and so on. Only 13 out of 16 villages in Nusa Penida use the Nusa Penida dialect. The remaining villages either speak the Nusa Lembongan dialect or a dialect resembling mainland Klungkung Balinese.
The Nusa Penida dialect is also used outside Nusa Penida, mainly due to the migration of its speakers following the eruption of Mount Agung in 1963. Significant speakers relocated to southern Sumatra, particularly to Bandar Lampung, Palembang, Mesuji, and East Lampung.
Balinese has been written in two different writing systems: the Balinese script, and in modern times the Latin script.
The Balinese script (Aksara Bali, ᬅᬓ᭄ᬱᬭᬩᬮᬶ), which is arranged as Hanacaraka (ᬳᬦᬘᬭᬓ), is an abugida, ultimately derived from the Brāhmī script of India. The earliest known inscriptions date from the 9th century AD.
Few people today are familiar with the Balinese script. The Balinese script is almost the same as the Javanese script.
Schools in Bali today teach a Latin alphabet known as Tulisan Bali.
^1 In Balinese script, Sanskrit and Kawi loanwords tend use conservative orthography as standard form in Balinese script. The word for language, basa, in Balinese is a loanword from Old Javanese bhāṣa which came from the Sanskrit word भाषा bhāṣā, hence it is written according to Sanskrit and Old Javanese spelling ᬪᬵᬱᬩᬮᬶ in Balinese script. The ᬩᬲᬩᬮᬶ form in Balinese script is used by beginner writers. Meanwhile, diacritics are not written in the current romanization of the Balinese language. Thus, both ᬪᬵᬱᬩᬮᬶ and basa Bali are the standard forms.