Totoli language

Totoli
Native toParts of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
Native speakers
(25,000 cited 2001)
Language codes
ISO 639-3txe
Glottologtoto1304
ELPTotoli

Totoli (also known as Tolitoli) is a Sulawesi language of the Austronesian language family spoken by about 25,000 of the Totoli people of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Grammar

Voice

Totoli has a symmetrical voice system. In the examples below, i Winarno mongusut kunji motorna is an actor voice construction, while kunji itu kusuti i Winarno is an undergoer voice construction.

I

HON

Winaro

PN

moN-kusut

AV-look.for

kunji

key

motor=na

scooter=3S.GEN

I Winaro moN-kusut kunji motor=na

HON PN AV-look.for key scooter=3S.GEN

'Winarno is looking for the keys of his scooter.': 1 

kunji

key

itu

DIST

kusut-i

look.for-UV.2

i

HON

Winaro

PN

kunji itu kusut-i i Winaro

key DIST look.for-UV.2 HON PN

'The keys are being looked for by Winarno.': 1 

The syntactic pivot can be placed before the predicate, as shown:

gaukan

king

no-gutu

AV.RLS-make

ponguman

story

itu

DIST

gaukan no-gutu ponguman itu

king AV.RLS-make story DIST

'The king made this announcement.': 142 

kopi

coffee

ia

PRX

ni-pogutu

RLS(UG)-make

i

PN

Andris

Andrew

kopi ia ni-pogutu i Andris

coffee PRX RLS(UG)-make PN Andrew

'Andrew made this coffee.': 143 

References

  1. ↑ Totoli at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ↑ Fatinah, Siti; Maerina, Ryen; Hastuti, Heksa Biopsi Puji; Karsana, Deni; Agus, Nuraidar; Septiana, Dwiani; Yulianti, Andi Indah (2025-12-31). "Totoli language: could it be extinct?". Cogent Arts & Humanities. 12 (1). doi:10.1080/23311983.2024.2432139. ISSN 2331-1983.
  3. 1 2 3 Riesberg, Sonja (2014). Symmetrical voice and linking in Western Austronesian languages. Walter de Gruyter.
  4. 1 2 Adelaar, K. Alexander; Himmelmann, Nikolaus, eds. (2005). The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar.

Totoli DoReCo corpus compiled by Maria Bardají, Christoph Bracks, Claudia Leto, Datra Hasan, Sonja Riesberg, Winarno S. Alamudi and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.