Phonetic and Phonotactic Analysis of Manggarai Language

Abstract

Manggarai language is one of sixty-eight languages spoken in East Nusa Tenggara. This language is spoken in West Manggarai Regency which has Labuan Bajo as its capital. This language is unique in that it contains phonemes and phoneme combinations which are not found in Indonesian or its neighbouring languages. Thus, this article will explore the phonetic and phonotactic structures of Manggarai language. The materials were taken from Swadesh-based Wordlist. The method used for collecting data was translating 250 words into Manggarai language and recording the pronunciation of those words by a native speaker of Manggarai language. The results revealed that based on the data, Manggarai language only have five places of articulation: bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar and glottal and five manners of articulation: plosive, fricative, nasal, semi vowel and approximant. As for the phonotactic structure, some nasals function as pre-phoneme such as [nt] and [mb]. In conclusion, Manggarai language is an interesting language to study, especially because it has specific phonetic characteristics. Researching an ethnic language like Manggarai language is important as one of the ways to preserve endangered languages.