Kambera is a Malayo-Polynesian language

Malayo-Polynesian languages

The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. These are widely dispersed throughout the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia...

 spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands

Lesser Sunda Islands

The Lesser Sunda Islands or Nusa Tenggara are a group of islands in the southern Maritime Southeast Asia, north of Australia. Together with the Greater Sunda Islands to the west they make up the Sunda Islands...

, Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

. Kambera is a member of Bima-Sumba subgrouping within Central Malayo-Polynesian inside Malayo-Polynesian. The island of Sumba, located in the Eastern Indonesia, has an area of 12,297 sq. km. The name Kambera comes from a traditional region which is close to a town in Waingapu. Because of export trades which concentrated in Waingapu

Waingapu

Waingapu is the largest town on the island of Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. It is the capital town of the Regency of Sumba Timur. Sumba Timur's Waingapu Airport 'Mau Hau' is located in Waingapu, and the town is served by ferries from nearby islands. The sub-district town has a population...

 in the 19th century, the language of the Kambera region has become the bridging language in eastern Sumba. There are many names for the language Kambera. Its speakers refer to Kambera as hilu Humba ‘Sumbanese language’. In the Dutch literature, Kambera is known as Sumbaneesch, Sumba(a)sch, Oost-Sumbaas and Kamberaas. In Indonesian literature, it is referred as Bahasa Sumba/Kamberaor Bahasa Sumba Timur dalam dialek Kambera (‘Eastern Sumbanese in the Kambera dialect’).

Vowels

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
High	i iː	u uː
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...	e ai	o au
Low	a, aː

The diphthong

Diphthong

A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...

s /ai/ and /au/ function phonologically as the long counterparts to /e/ and /o/, respectively.

Consonants

	Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	p	t		k
Implosive Implosive consonant Implosive consonants are stops with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can...	ɓ	ɗ
Voiced affricate			dʒ
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m	n		ŋ
Prenasalized stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	ᵐb	ⁿd		ᵑɡ
Prenasalized affricate			ᶮdʒ
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...					h
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....		l
Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...		r
Semivowel Semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...	w		j
Prenasalized semivowel Semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...			ᶮj

Kambera formerly had /s/, but a sound change

Sound change

Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...

 occurring around the turn of the 20th century replaced all occurrences of former /s/ with /h/.

Pronouns and Person Markers

Personal pronouns are used in Kambera for emphasis/disambiguation and the syntactic relation between full pronouns and clitic

Clitic

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...

s is similar to that between NPs and clitics. NPs and pronouns have morphological case

Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...

.

Personal Pronouns

Person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	| Number Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
	Singular	Plural
1INC		nyuta
1EXCL	nyungga	nyuma
2	nyumu	nyimi
3	nyuna	nyuda

Kambera, as a head-marking language

Head-marking language

A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...

, has rich morpho-syntactic marking on its predicators. The pronominal, aspectual and/or mood clitics together with the predicate constitute the nuclear clause

Clause

In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...

. Definite verbal arguments are crossreferenced on the predicate for person, number and case (Nominative

Nominative case

The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...

 (N), Gentive

Genitive case

In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...

 (G), Dative

Dative case

The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....

 (D), Accusative

Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...

 (A)). The four main pronominal clitic paradigms are given below.

	Nominative	Genitive	Accusative	Dative
1SG	ku-	-nggu	-ka	-ngga
2SG	(m)u-	-mu	-kau	-nggao
3SG	na-	-na	-ya	-nya
1PL.INC	ta-	-nda	ta-	-nda
1PL.EXC	ma-	-ma	-kama	-nggama
2PL	(m)i-	-mi	-ka(m)i	-ngga(m)i
3PL	da-	-da	-ha	-nja

Examples:

(1)	apu-nggu'
	granny-1SG.GEN
	"My granny."

(2)	ana-na'
	child-3SG.GEN
	"His child."

(3)	Kau	pa.ta.lunggur-ya	na	wihi-na
	scratch	CAU.be sore	ART	leg-3SG.GEN
	"He scratched his leg sore." (lit. "He scratched and caused his leg to be sore")

(4)	Na-tari-bia	nahu	angu-na
	3SG.NOM-watch-MOD	now	companion-3SG.GEN
	"He just watches his comapnion."

(5)	Ningu	uma-nggua
	be.here	house-3SG.GEN
	"I have a house." (lit. "Here is a house of mine.")

(6)	Nyuda-ha-ka	nahu	da	ana-nda
	they-3PL.ACC-PRF	now	ART	child-1PL.GEN
	"They are our children now."

The items in the table below mark person and number of the subject when the clause has continuative aspect.

Person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	| Number Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
	Singular	Plural
1INC		-ndanya
1EXCL	-nggunya	-manya
2	-munya	-minya
3	-nanya	-danya

Examples:

(1)	Lunggur-nanya	na	Ihi-na
	scratch-3SG.CONT	ART	body-3SG.GEN
	"He is scratching his body."

(2)	"Laku-nnguya	ina",	wa-na
	go-1SG.CONT	mother	say-3SG
	"'I am going, mother," he said.'"

External links

• Ethnologue report for language code:xbr