The northern dialect of Tukang Besi has 25 consonant phonemes and a basic 5-vowel system.[3] It features stress which is usually on the second-to-last syllable. The language has two implosive consonants, which are uncommon in the world's languages. The coronal plosives and /s/ have prenasalized counterparts which act as separate phonemes.
Tukang Besi does not have grammatical gender or number. It is an ergative–absolutive language.
Verbs
Tukang Besi has an inflectional future tense, which is indicated with a prefix, but no past tense.
Word order
Tukang Besi uses verb–object–subject word order, which is also used by Fijian. Like many Austronesian languages, it has prepositions, but places adjectives, genitives, and determiners after nouns. Yes–no questions are indicated by a particle at the end of the sentence.[5]
^Donohue, Mark (1996). "Some trade languages of insular South-East Asia and Irian Jaya". In Wurm, Stephen A.; Mühlhäusler, Peter; Tryon, Darrell T. (eds.). Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 713–716.
^ abDonohue, Mark (1999). "Tukang Besi". Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press. pp. 151–53. ISBN0-521-65236-7.
^Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (2013). "Language Tukang Besi". The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved 27 February 2021.
Further reading
Donohue, Mark (1995). The Tukang Besi Language of Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia (Ph.D. thesis). The Australian National University. doi:10.25911/5D70F30ACBE63. hdl:1885/136142.
Donohue, Mark (2000). "Tukang Besi dialectology". In Grimes, C.E. (ed.). Spices from the East: Papers in languages of Eastern Indonesia. Pacific Linguistics No. 503. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 55–72. doi:10.15144/PL-503.55. hdl:1885/146101.