Betawi

Betawi is the Malay-based vernacular of Jakarta, the everyday speech of the Betawi people, who coalesced in colonial Batavia out of Malay, Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, Chinese, Arab and Mardijker ancestries. It is Malayic in structure but heavily restructured by contact: its ordinary personal pronouns are Hokkien loans (guè 'I' from 我, lu 'you' from 汝), and much of its everyday lexicon comes from Javanese, Balinese, Arabic and Dutch. The most audible marker of the urban Jakarta variety is the shift of word-final -a to -è (apa → apè, kita → kitè), alongside loss of final -h (rumah → ruma) and the lowering of /ai/ and /au/ to /aɛ/ and /o/ (air → aèr, kalau → kalo). It was written for generations in an Arabic-derived script known locally as Arab Gundul as well as in Latin letters, and has a substantial recorded song and film tradition. Ethnologue rates it 6b, threatened: adults across Greater Jakarta still speak it, but Indonesian is displacing it among the young, even as Betawi pronouns and particles have become the backbone of national colloquial Indonesian.

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