Uab Meto language

Percentage of people using Baikeno as mother tongue in Timor-Leste, according census 2010

Uab Meto or Dawan is an Austronesian language spoken by Atoni people of West Timor. The language has a variant spoken in the East Timorese exclave of Oecussi-Ambeno, called Baikenu. Baikenu uses words derived from Portuguese, for example, obrigadu for 'thank you', instead of the Indonesian terima kasih.

Phonology

Dawan has the following consonants and vowels:

Voiceless plosives [p t k] can have unreleased allophones [p̚ k̚] in word-final position. A phonemic /r/ can be heard in place of /l/ among dialects.

Vocabulary

A wordlist of 200 basic vocabulary items is available at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, with data provided by Robert Blust and from Edwards (2016).

Numbers

See also

References

Further reading


Uses material from the Wikipedia article Uab Meto language, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.