Kéo language
Kéo language
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Kéo language

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Kéo language

Kéo or Nagé-Kéo is a Malayo-Polynesian dialect cluster spoken by the Kéo and Nage people (ʼata Kéo 'Kéo people') that reside in an area southeast of the Ebu Lobo volcano in the south-central part of Nusa Tenggara Timur Province on the island of Flores, eastern Indonesia, largely in the eponymous Nagekeo Regency.

Kéo belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Bima-Lembata subgroups of the Austronesian language family and there are approximately 40,000 speakers.

Kéo is sometimes referred to as Nage-Kéo, Nage being the name of a neighbouring ethnic group that is generally considered culturally distinct from Kéo; however, whether or not the two languages are separate entities is ambivalent.

Uncommon to Austronesian languages, Kéo is a highly isolating language that lacks inflectional morphology or clear morphological derivation. Instead it relies more heavily on lexical and syntactic grammatical processes.

Kéo (referred to locally as sara kita 'our language' or sara ndai 'the language here' as well as Bahasa Bajawa[what language is this?] 'the Bajawa language' by people not from central Flores) has distinct dialectal variation between villages. Kéo speakers are able to determine where someone is from based on pronunciation and word use.

Overall, the attitude towards Kéo by its speakers is unfavourable. It is considered more economically beneficial to speak Indonesian or English. Despite this sentiment, a sense of respect for the language remains through its oral traditions.

The Kéo spoken in the village of Udiworowatu (where the majority of data has been collected on the language) has a phonemic inventory of 23 consonants.

Kéo has six vowel phonemes.

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