Semai language

Semai language

language
name=Semai
states=Peninsular Malaysia
speakers=33,000
familycolor=Austroasiatic
fam2=Mon-Khmer
fam3=Southern
fam4=Aslian
fam5=Senoic
iso2=mkh|iso3=sea

Semai is an Austroasiatic language belonging to the Mon-Khmer subgroup, and it is spoken in Western Malaysia by about 33,000 speakers.

One notable aspect of Semai phonology is its highly irregular pattern of expressive reduplication, showing discontiguous copying from just the edges of the reduplicant's base, thus forming a minor syllable.

References

*Diffloth, Gerard. 1976a. Minor-Syllable Vocalism in Senoic Languages. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.), Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, 229-247. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
*Diffloth, Gerard. 1976b. Expressives in Semai. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.), Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, 249-264. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
*Hendricks, Sean. 2001. Bare-Consonant Reduplication Without Prosodic Templates: Expressive Reduplication in Semai. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 10: 287-306.


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