Tetum language


Tetum , Tetun , is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Timor. It is spoken in Belu Regency in Indonesian West Timor, and across the border in East Timor, where it is one of the two official languages. In East Timor Tetun Dili, or Tetun Prasa, is widely spoken fluently as a second language; without previous contact, the Tetum dialects and Tetun Dili are not immediately mutually intelligible, mainly because of the large number of Portuguese origin words used in Tetun Dili. Besides some grammatical simplification, Tetun Dili has been greatly influenced by the vocabulary and to a small extent by the grammar of Portuguese, the other official language of East Timor.

Nomenclature

The English form "Tetum" is derived from Portuguese, rather than from modern Tetum. Consequently, some people regard "Tetun" as more appropriate. Although this coincides with the favoured Indonesian form, and the variant with "m" has a longer history in English, "Tetun" has also been used by some Portuguese-educated Timorese, such as José Ramos-Horta and Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo.
Similar disagreements over nomenclature have emerged regarding the names of other languages, such as Swahili/Kiswahili and Punjabi/Panjabi.

History and dialects

According to linguist Geoffrey Hull, Tetum has four dialects:
Tetun-Belu and Tetun-Terik are not spoken outside their home territories. Tetun-Prasa is the form of Tetum that is spoken throughout East Timor. Although Portuguese was the official language of Portuguese Timor until 1975, Tetun-Prasa has always been the predominant lingua franca in the eastern part of the island.
In the fifteenth century, before the arrival of the Portuguese, Tetum had spread through central and eastern Timor as a contact language under the aegis of the Belunese-speaking Kingdom of Wehali, at that time the most powerful kingdom in the island. The Portuguese made most of their settlements in the west, where Dawan was spoken, and it was not until 1769, when the capital was moved from Lifau to Dili that they began to promote Tetum as an inter-regional language in their colony. Timor was one of the few Portuguese colonies where a local language, and not a form of Portuguese, became the lingua franca: this is because Portuguese rule was indirect rather than direct, the Europeans governing through local kings who embraced Catholicism and became vassals of the King of Portugal.
When Indonesia occupied East Timor between 1975 and 1999, declaring it "the Republic's 27th Province", the use of Portuguese was banned, and Indonesian was declared the sole official language, but the Roman Catholic Church adopted Tetum as its liturgical language, making it a focus for cultural and national identity. After the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor took over governance in September 1999, Tetun was proclaimed the country's official language, even though according to Encarta Winkler Prins it was only spoken by about 8% of the native population at the time, while the elite spoke Portuguese and most adolescents had been educated in Indonesian. When East Timor gained its independence on 20 May 2002, Tetum and Portuguese were declared as official languages. The 2010 census found that Tetum Prasa had 385,269 native speakers on a total population of 1,053,971, meaning that the share of native Tetum Prasa/Dili speakers had increased to 36.6% during the 2000s.
In addition to regional varieties of Tetum in East Timor, there are variations in vocabulary and pronunciation, partly due to Portuguese and Indonesian influence. The Tetum spoken by East Timorese migrants in Portugal and Australia is more Portuguese-influenced, as many of those speakers were not educated in Indonesian.

Vocabulary

Indigenous

The Tetum name for East Timor is Timór Lorosa'e, which means "Timor of the rising sun", or, less poetically, "East Timor"; lorosa'e comes from loro "sun" and sa'e "to rise, to go up". The noun for "word" is liafuan, from lia "voice" and fuan "fruit". Some more words in Tetum:
Words derived from Portuguese:
As a result of Bazaar Malay being a regional lingua franca, many words are derived from Malay, including:
In addition, as a legacy of Indonesian rule, other words of Malay origin have entered Tetum, through Indonesian.

Numerals

However, Tetum speakers often use Malay/Indonesian or Portuguese numbers instead, such as
delapan or oito "eight" instead of ualu, especially for numbers over one thousand.

Combinations

Tetum has many hybrid words, which are combinations of indigenous and Portuguese words. These often include an indigenous Tetum verb, with a Portuguese suffix -dór. For example:

Morphology

Personal pronouns

Examples:
A common occurrence is to use titles such as Senhora for a woman or names rather than pronouns when addressing people.
Example:
The second person singular pronoun Ó is used generally with children, friends or family, while with strangers or people of higher social status, Ita or Ita boot is used.
Example:

Nouns and pronouns

Plural
The plural is not normally marked on nouns, but the word sira "they" can express it when necessary.
However, the plural ending -s of nouns of Portuguese origin is sometimes retained.
Definiteness
Tetum has an optional indefinite article ida, used after nouns:
There is no definite article, but the demonstratives ida-ne'e and ida-ne'ebá may be used to express definiteness:
In the plural, sira-ne'e or sira-ne'ebá are used:
Possessive/genitive
The particle nia forms the inalienable possessive, and can be used in a similar way to 's in English, e.g.:
When the possessor is postposed, representing alienable possession, nia becomes nian:
Inclusive and exclusive "we"
Like other Austronesian languages, Tetum has two forms of "we", ami which is exclusive, e.g. "I and they", and ita, which is inclusive, e.g. "you, I, and they".
Nominalization
Nouns derived from verbs or adjectives are usually formed with affixes, for example the suffix -na'in, similar to "-er" in English.
The suffix -na'in can also be used with nouns, in the sense of "owner".
In more traditional forms of Tetum, the circumfix ma- -k is used instead of -na'in. For example, the nouns "sinner" or "wrongdoer" can be derived from the word sala as either maksalak, or sala-na'in. Only the prefix ma- is used when the root word ends with a consonant; for example, the noun "cook" or "chef" can be derived from the word te'in as makte'in as well as te'in-na'in.
The suffix -teen can be used with adjectives to form derogatory terms:

Adjectives

Derivation from nouns
To turn a noun into a nominalised adjective, the word oan is added to it.
Thus, "Timorese person" is Timor-oan, as opposed to the country of Timor, rai-Timor.
To form adjectives and actor nouns from verbs, the suffix -dór can be added:
Gender
Tetum does not have separate masculine and feminine gender, hence nia can mean either "he", "she" or "it".
Different forms for the genders only occur in Portuguese-derived adjectives, hence obrigadu is used by men, and obrigada by women. The masculine and feminine forms of other adjectives derived from Portuguese are sometimes used with Portuguese loanwords, particularly by Portuguese-educated speakers of Tetum.
In some instances, the different gender forms have distinct translations into English:
In indigenous Tetum words, the suffixes -mane and -feto are sometimes used to differentiate between the genders:
Comparatives and superlatives
Superlatives can be formed from adjectives by reduplication:
When making comparisons, the word liu is used after the adjective, optionally followed by duké :
To describe something as the most or least, the word hotu is added:

Adverbs

Adverbs can be formed from adjectives or nouns by reduplication:

Prepositions and circumpositions

The most commonly used prepositions in Tetum are the verbs iha and baa/ba. Most prepostional concepts of English are expressed by nominal phrases formed by using iha, the object and the position,optionally with the possessive nia.

Verbs

Copula and negation
There is no verb "to be" as such, but the word la'ós, which translates as "not to be", is used for negation:
The word maka, which roughly translates as "who is" or "what is", can be used with an adjective for emphasis:
Interrogation
The interrogative is formed by using the words ka or ka lae.
Derivation from nouns and adjectives
s are formed by adding the prefix ha- or hak- to a noun or adjective:
Intransitive verbs are formed by adding the prefix na- or nak- to a noun or adjective:
Conjugations and [inflection]s (in Tetun-Terik)
In Tetun-Terik, verbs inflect when they begin with a vowel or consonant h. In this case mutation of the first consonant occurs. For example, the verb haree in Tetun-Terik would be conjugated as follows:

Tenses

Past

Whenever possible, the past tense is simply inferred from the context, for example:
However, it can be expressed by placing the adverb ona at the end of a sentence.
When ona is used with la this means "no more" or "no longer", rather than "have not":
In order to convey that an action has not occurred, the word seidauk is used:
When relating an action that occurred in the past, the word tiha is used with the verb.

Future

The future tense is formed by placing the word sei before a verb:
The negative is formed by adding la between sei and the verb:

Aspects

Perfect

The perfect aspect can be formed by using tiha ona.
When negated, tiha ona indicates that an action ceased to occur:
In order to convey that a past action had not or never occurred, the word ladauk is used:

Progressive

The progressive aspect can be obtained by placing the word hela after a verb:

Imperative

The imperative mood is formed using the word ba at the end of a sentence, hence:
The word lai may also be used when making a request rather than a command:
When forbidding an action labele or keta are used:

Orthography and phonology

The influence of Portuguese and to a lesser extent Malay/Indonesian on the phonology of Tetun has been extensive.
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

In the tetun language,, and tend to have relatively fixed sounds. However and vary according to the environment they are placed in, for instance the sound is slightly higher if the proceeding syllable is or.
All consonants appearing in parenthesis are used only in loanwords.
Stops: All stops in Tetum are un-aspirated, meaning an expulsion of breath is absent. In contrast, English stops namely ‘p’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ are generally aspirated.
Fricatives:
is an unstable voiced labio-dental fricative and tends to alternate with or is replaced by ; e.g. – meaning grandparent.
As Tetum did not have any official recognition or support under either Portuguese or Indonesian rule, it is only recently that a standardised orthography has been established by the National Institute of Linguistics. The standard orthography devised by the institute was declared official by Government Decree 1/2004 of 14 April 2004. However, there are still widespread variations in spelling, one example being the word bainhira or "when", which has also been written as bain-hira, wainhira, waihira, uaihira. The use of "w" or "u" is a reflection of the pronunciation in some rural dialects of Tetun-Terik.
The current orthography originates from the spelling reforms undertaken by Fretilin in 1974, when it launched literacy campaigns across East Timor, and also from the system used by the Catholic Church when it adopted Tetum as its liturgical language during the Indonesian occupation. These involved the transcription of many Portuguese words that were formerly written in their original spelling, for example, educação → edukasaun "education", and colonialismo → kolonializmu "colonialism".
Reforms suggested by the International Committee for the Development of East Timorese Languages in 1996 included the replacement of the digraphs "nh" and "lh" by "n̄" and "l̄", respectively, to avoid confusion with the consonant clusters and, which also occur in Tetum. Thus, senhor "sir" became sen̄ór, and trabalhador "worker" became trabal̄adór. Later, as adopted by IACDETL and approved by the INL in 2002, "n̄" and "l̄" were replaced by "ñ" and "ll". Thus, sen̄ór "sir" became señór, and trabal̄adór "worker" became traballadór. Some linguists favoured using "ny" and "ly" for these sounds, but the latter spellings were rejected for being similar to the Indonesian system, and most speakers actually pronounce ñ and ll as and, respectively, with a semivowel which forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel, not as the palatal consonants of Portuguese and Spanish. Thus, señór, traballadór are pronounced,, and liña, kartilla are pronounced,. As a result, some writers use "in" and "il" instead, for example Juinu and Juilu for June and July.
As well as variations in the transliteration of Portuguese loanwords, there are also variations in the spelling of indigenous words. These include the use of double vowels and the apostrophe for the glottal stop, for example boot → bot "large" and ki'ik → kiik "small".
The sound, which is not indigenous to Tetum but appears in many loanwords from Portuguese and Malay, often changed to in old Tetum and to in the speech of young speakers: for example, meja "table" from Portuguese mesa, and kamija "shirt" from Portuguese camisa. In the sociolect of Tetum that is still used by the generation educated during the Indonesian occupation, and may occur in free variation. For instance, the Portuguese-derived word ezemplu "example" is pronounced by some speakers, and conversely Janeiru "January" is pronounced. The sound, also not native to the language, often shifted to, as in serbisu "work" from Portuguese serviço.