South Barisan Malay

South Barisan Malay, also called Central Malay or Middle Malay, is a collection of closely related Malayic isolects spoken in the southwestern part of Sumatra. None of them has more than one million speakers.

South Barisan Malay
Central Malay
Native to	Indonesia
Region	Bengkulu South Sumatra Lampung
Native speakers	1.6 million (2000)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Malayo-Chamic Malayic South Barisan Malay
Dialects	Benakat Bengkulu Besemah Enim Lematang Ulu Lintang Ogan Rambang Semende Serawai
Language codes
ISO 639-3	pse
Glottolog	high1292  (partial)
The distribution of Barisan lects across southern Sumatra.

Name

Traditionally, Malayic lects in southern Sumatra are divided based on river shed and microethnic boundaries, regardless of actual similarities and differences between them. Linguists originally used the term Middle Malay (a calque of Dutch Midden-Maleisch) when referring to the closely related lects in the Pasemah-Serawai cultural region. Later, to avoid misidentification with a temporal stage of Malay language (i.e. the transition between Old Malay and Modern Malay), the term Central Malay began to be used.^[2] McDonnell (2016) uses the geographic term South Barisan Malay instead, referring to the southern region of the Barisan Mountains where these lects are spoken.^[3]

Varieties

McDowell & Anderbeck (2020) classified South Barisan lects into 2 major dialect clusters, namely 1) Oganic and 2) Highland.^[4]

• Oganic
  • Ogan
  • Rambang
  • Enim
• Highland
  • Bengkulu
  • Besemah
  • Lematang Ulu
  • Lintang
  • Semende
  • Benakat
  • Serawai
  • Kaur (ISO 639-3: vkk)
  • Pekal (ISO 639-3: pel)

This classification was partially adopted (with the exception of Pekal) by Glottolog in its latest version (4.8).^[5] All ISO 639-3 language codes for South Barisan Malay varieties were merged into [pse] in 2007 by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, with the exceptions of [vkk] for Kaur and [pel] for Pekal.^[4] The old codes ([bke], [eni], [lnt], [ogn], [sdd], [srj]) are no longer in active use, but still have the meaning assigned to them when they were established in the Standard.

References

1. South Barisan Malay at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Adelaar, K. Alexander (1992). Proto-Malayic: The Reconstruction of its Phonology and Parts of its Lexicon and Morphology. Pacific Linguistics, Series C, no. 119. Canberra: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University. hdl:1885/145782.
3. McDonnell, Bradley James (2016). Symmetrical Voice Constructions in Besemah: A Usage-based Approach (PhD thesis). University of California, Santa Barbara.
4. McDowell, Jonathan; Anderbeck, Karl (2020). The Malay Lects of Southern Sumatra. JSEALS Special Publication. Vol. 7. University of Hawai'i Press. hdl:10524/52473.
5. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian (2023). "South Sumatra Malay". Glottolog 4.8. Leipzig, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved 25 December 2023.