Ulumandaʼ language

Ulumandaʼ is an Austronesian language of West Sulawesi, Indonesia. It is nearly intelligible with other Pitu Ulunna Salu languages,^[2] but Ulumanda’ is distinguished by an unusual series of front vowels.

Ulumandaʼ
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Sulawesi
Native speakers	(30,000 cited 1986)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian South Sulawesi Northern Pitu Ulunna Salu Ulumandaʼ
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ulm
Glottolog	ulum1237

Phonology

The vowel inventory of Ulumandaʼ is as follows:^[3]

Vowels of Ulumandaʼ according to Zobel (2018)

	Front	Back
Close	i y	u
Mid	e ø	o
Open	æ	ɑ

The attested consonant inventory is as follows:

Consonants attested in the vocabulary of Smith (1993)^[4]

		Labial	Alveolar	Dorsal	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t	k	ʔ
	voiced	b	d	ɡ
Nasal		m	n	ŋ
Fricative			s		h
Trill			r
Lateral			l
Approximant				j

Vowel harmony

Ulumandaʼ is unusual among the Austronesian languages of Sulawesi for featuring a vowel harmony opposition of front vowels /æ, ø, y/ to corresponding back vowels /ɑ, o, u/ comparable to that of the Uralic languages. Originally, fronted vowels arose from the fronting of back vowels before syllable-final velar consonants *k and *ŋ, but were phonemicized in final syllables when word-final *-m and *-n merged with *ŋ to result in -ŋ but did not front a preceding back vowel unlike original *-ŋ. These fronted vowels then fronted any other back vowels in a word except if a neutral vowel like *e or *i intervened between the vowels.

A contrastive pair includes /uraŋ/ "person" vs. /uræŋ/ [yræŋ] "shrimp".