Balinese language



The Balinese language (basa Bali, Standard Balinese pronunciation: [basə ˈbali]; Indonesian: bahasa Bali) is an Austronesian language in the Malayo-Polynesian language branch. It is spoken on the Indonesian island of Bali, as well as Nusa Penida, Western Lombok, Eastern Java (especially Banyuwangi), Southern Sumatra, and Sulawesi. Most Balinese speakers also use Indonesian. The 2000 national census recorded 3.3 million people speakers of Balinese, however the Bali Cultural Agency estimated in 2011 that the number of people still using the Balinese language in their daily lives is under 1 million. The language has been classified as "not endangered" by Glottolog.

The higher registers of the language borrows extensively from Javanese: an old form of classical Javanese, Kawi, is used in Bali as a religious and ceremonial language. Balinese is the majority language in Tegaldlimo district of Banyuwangi, East Java and some villages in Banyuwangi. It is also widely used in urban Sumbawa.

Classification
Balinese is an Austronesian language belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family. Within Malayo-Polynesian, it is part of the Bali–Sasak–Sumbawa subgroup. Internally, Balinese has three distinct varieties; Highland Bali, Lowland Bali, and Nusa Penida Balinese.

Demographics


According to the 2000 census, the Balinese language is spoken by 3.3 million people in Indonesia, mainly concentrated on the island of Bali and the surrounding areas.

In 2011, the Bali Cultural Agency estimated that the number of people still using the Balinese language in their daily lives on Bali Island does not exceed 1 million, as in urban areas their parents only introduce the Indonesian language or even English as a foreign language, while daily conversations in the institutions and the mass media have disappeared. The written form of the Balinese language is increasingly unfamiliar and most Balinese people use the Balinese language only as a means of oral communication, often mixing it with Indonesian in their daily speech. However, in the transmigration areas outside Bali Island, the Balinese language is extensively used and believed to play an important role in the survival of the language.

Dialects
Balinese has three main dialects which has its own characteristics, even residents between regency and villages have their own dialects of the three, Lowland Balinese or Kapara Balinese is the most commonly used dialect on the island and is also the standard language The Lowland Balinese or 'Kapara Balinese' is the most widely used dialect of the Balinese people, and is the standard form of the language. This dialect first initially developed in Klungkung and sonner later spread to other areas of Bali the majority in all regency in Bali Apart from that, it is also used on neighboring islands such as Lombok mainly used by immigrants from Karangasem who still use Balinese as their daily language and use it in especially the western part of the island they mostly came from the former kingdom of Karangasem, after the Dutch intervened in Lombok and Karangasem most Karangasemese people chose to remain there. This dialect is also widely spoken in East Java especially in the Banyuwangi area by Jembrana Buleleng migrants. in Banyuwangi this dialect is the majority in some districts and villages. Because it is the standard language and common language, this dialect is also the language for most of the Balinese other diaspora in other province in Indonesia and the whole world
 * Lowland Balinese
 * Highland Balinese

The Highland Balinese or Bali Aga dialect is a dialect used by native Balinese people, Bali Aga this dialect is the oldest dialect of Balinese which is still used ancient Austronesian words and little Sanskrit influence, this dialect is mainly used in  Kintamani, Bangli, East Buleleng and Eastern Karangasem and significant in Bangli, Klungkung, Northern Badung,Tabanan and Denpasar cpital city. This dialect is threatened because modern Bali Aga people are not confident in using this dialect and they prefer to use standard Balinese, they face discrimination from people with other Balinese dialects. The population of the Bali Aga people is approximately 63,000
 * Nusa Penida Balinese

The Nusa Penida Balinese or called 'basa nosa' by its speakers is a dialect of the Balinese language used on the main island of Nusa Penida and the small islands around it, which is administratively included in Klungkung Regency, this dialect also spoken in mainland Bali island especially in the government center of Klungkung, and other regency in Bali and the speakers also took part in the transmigration program, most of them migrated to South Sumatra and Lampung. This dialect is spoken by around 59,900 according to the 2022 census. The Nusa Penida dialect is similar to Bali Aga dialect even though there are some differences too. different from the Bali Aga dialect which can still be understood the Nusa Penida dialect considered a unique and different dialect in the Balinese language because most mainland Balinese do not understand the this dialect verbally and in writing because this dialect is very different from other dialects in Bali which can still be understood.

Vowels
The official spelling denotes both and  by. However, is usually pronounced  when it ends a word, and  occurs also in prefixes ma-, pa- and da-.

Consonants
Depending on dialect, the phoneme is realized as a voiceless alveolar or retroflex stop. This is in contrast with most other languages in western Indonesia (including Standard Indonesian), which have a dental patterning with an otherwise alveolar phoneme series.

Stress
Stress falls on the last syllable.

Registers
Even though most basic vocabulary in Balinese and Indonesian originates from Austronesian and Sanskrit, many cognates sound quite different between languages. Balinese has four different registers: low, middle , and high , the uses of which depend on the relationship and status of those speaking and those being spoken about. High Balinese is not commonly used except to speak to pedandas, so few are fluent in it. The common mutations in inherited Balinese words are:


 * r > h / #_, r > h / V_V, and r > h / _#. That is, r mutates into h at the beginning of every word, the end of every word, and between any two vowels.
 * h > ø / !_#. The phoneme h is lost everywhere except at the ends of words.

However, these mutations are not expressed in High Balinese, indicating that High Balinese contains many loanwords from Sanskrit and (Old) Javanese. These loanwords are identical in sound to their modern Javanese cognates, but reflect fifteenth-century usages from Old Javanese.

Numerals
Balinese has a decimal numeral system, but this is complicated by numerous words for intermediate quantities such as 45, 175, and 1600.

Pronouns
Kinship terms can be used as pronouns. If these pronouns are used as agents, they refer to either the speaker or the listener, depending on context. Though first and second person pronouns need no antecedent to be understood, third person pronouns do.

Time
Instead of grammatical tense, Balinese uses temporal adverbs to talk about time.

For present tense, the adverb jani ("now") can be either definite or indefinite depending on context. Its more emphatic form, jani san ("right now"), is definite. The indefinite word ajanian ("up to now") refers to any time before or during the utterance.

The word buin/bin ("again") is obligatory for puan and telun to clarify that they are not being used for their past tense meanings. Mani, manian, and puan can all be prefixed with mani to refer to the future.

Grammar
Balinese is agglutinative. Verb and noun inflectional morphology is similarly minimal to Indonesian, but derivational morphology is extensive.

Affixes
Of the two dative suffixes, -ang and -in, the latter should be used if the object is animate. The suffix -né / -é marks nouns for both definiteness and possession.

Nouns & modifiers
Nouns come before their modifiers, and are often marked with a deictic word, ento 'that' or ené 'this,'" to show that any modifiers act as modifiers instead of as verbs. The definite marker can also be attached to modifiers, especially any which conveys "an inherent property of its referent." Ajectives following possessive (and therefore definite) nouns function as  predicative, while adjectives following unmarked nouns function as attributive.

Verbs
Two types of serial verb constructions occur in Balinese. Both verbs are always fully inflected, but in the first type, the verbs have the same agent, whereas in the second, the object of the first verb is the subject of the second.

Word order & voices
The default, unmarked word order of Balinese is Patient Verb Agent. If the agent is a third person pronoun, it is attached to the verb as the clitic suffix -a.

This default word order can be reversed (Agent Verb Patient) with a nasal prefix on the verb. The nasal-marked word order cannot be an active  construction, because it is marked, nor can it be antipassive, because the patient can’t be omitted. It is considered a second type of transitive voice.

There is a true passive voice (Patient Verb Agent) borrowed from Javanese and marked by the verbal prefix ka-. It is used mostly in high registers. If the agent of this passive construction is third-person, it must be preceded by a preposition. If it is not third-person, it cannot be preceded by a preposition.

The second true passive voice (Patient Verb), marked by the verbal prefix ma-, always omits the agent. It connotes a complete event and is only available to some verbs.

Writing
Balinese has been written in two different writing systems: the Balinese script, and in modern times the Latin script.

Balinese script


The Balinese script (, ᬅᬓ᭄ᬱᬭᬩᬮᬶ), which is arranged as (ᬳᬦᬘᬭᬓ), is an abugida, ultimately derived from the Brāhmī script of India. The earliest known inscriptions date from the 9th century AD.

Few people today are familiar with the Balinese script. The Balinese script is almost the same as the Javanese script.

Latin alphabet
Schools in Bali teach a Latin alphabet known as, which formally has one diacritic, (é). This diacritic is still actively used and found in Balinese dictionaries and schools, but now is not commonly used elsewhere. The pronunciation is similar to Sasak.



Relations with other Austronesian languages
Balinese is an Austronesian language from the Malayo-Polynesian branch, just like most Austronesian languages, Balinese uses verbs first before nouns, basa Bali (Balinese language), tulis buku (notebooks), nyémak ember (Get a bucket), ngaba piring (Carrying plates), ngubuh sampi (raising cows) gumi sakti (grounded).

Balinese also still maintains close ties with other Austronesian languages, this is proven by the many words that have similarities in other Indonesian regions, Oceania, Polynesia the Philippines and even Taiwan. the word bok for hair in Balinese is the same as bok for hair in Batak language and the word irung and asu in Balinese which means nose and dog is similar to several dialects in the Philippines also has the same meaning. Bali Aga Balinese which is the oldest Balinese dialect, may have more similarities with other Austronesian languages because it does not have a strong influence from Sanskrit even the accent of the Bali Aga people sometimes sounds similar to the indigenous Taiwanese people, the Philippines and Oceania, Polynesia. Another similarity is in calculating numbers which is typical of Austronesian even though some borrow Sanskrit words 1. bésik/siki 2. dua

3. télu

4. papat

5. lima

6. eném

7. pitu

8. kutus

9. sia

10. dasa

It is still unknown why 8 is 'Kutus' in Balinese while 'Dasa' definitely comes from Sanskrit

Influence of other languages
Balinese as it is spoken today is great mixture contains many Sanskrit words, Chinese words, Parsi words, And English words, because of colonial and commercial activities, many words as sekolah, dokter, and buku have Dutch origins. Portuguese influence has produced such words as kemeja, bola, and jendela. English expressions such as "stop," botol, and tiket are heard everywhere.

Note
In Balinese script, Sanskrit and Kawi loanwords tend use conservative orthography as standard form in Balinese script. The word for language, basa, in Balinese is a loanword from Old Javanese which came from the Sanskrit word भाषा, hence it is written according to Sanskrit and Old Javanese spelling ᬪᬵᬱᬩᬮᬶ in Balinese script. The Bali form in Balinese script is used by beginner writers. Meanwhile, diacritics are not written in the current romanization of the Balinese language. Thus, both Bali and are the standard forms.