The phonology, morphology, and syntax of Sundanese

Abstract

Sundanese is an indigenous language that is spoken in West Java, Indonesia. This study considers the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Sundanese based on a corpus of more than two hundred words. It specifically aims to contribute to the literature of the language by providing some linguistic characteristics of Sundanese and comparing results to what has been previously introduced in the literature. Some previous studies of Sundanese have extensively covered the syntactic and some morphological structures of the language, but only a few studies have covered the phonological aspects. This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the morphological, syntactic, and phonological aspects of Sundanese based on the production of a native speaker of the language. The participant translated all words into Sundanese and provided the singular and the plural forms for each word in the list. The participant also produced sentences using the same words in the corpus. Data were then observed, and patterns were grouped and categorized for analysis. Results showed some similarities and differences to the findings of previous work in the field. Conclusions were drawn and comparisons were made where appropriate.