Makassar languages

The Makassar languages are a group of languages spoken in the southern part of South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, and make up one of the branches of the South Sulawesi subgroup in the Austronesian language family. The most prominent member of this group is Makassarese, with over two million speakers in the city of Makassar and neighboring areas.

The status of the Makassar languages, other than Makassarese, as distinct languages is not universally accepted. In older classifications, as well as in recent studies by local linguists, they are considered to be dialects of the Makassarese language.

A characteristic feature of the Makassar languages is the occurrence of echo vowels with stems ending in final /r/, /l/ or /s/. E.g. /botol/ 'bottle' is realized as bótolo in Selayar and Coastal Konjo, and as bótoloʔ in Makassarese and Highland Konjo (the latter regularly adds a glottal stop to the echo vowel). This echo vowel is dropped if a suffix is added, but retained if followed by an enclitic.

Konjo (both Coastal and Highland Konjo), Bentong, Selayar and the Labbakkang dialect of Makassarese have j /ɟ/ and /h/ where Makassarese (Maros, Goa, Takalar, Jeneponto, Bantaeng) has y /j/ and /w/. In some words, Coastal/Highland Konjo and Selayar have h corresponding to zero in Makassarese, e.g. Konjo/Selayar bahine ('female'), uhuʔ ('hair') vs. Makassarese baine, uʔ.

In Konjo languages, some initial b appears as /h/.