Campanula

Kangean or Kangeanese (referred to as Besa Kangean or Ocaq Kangean by local people) is a language spoken by the Kangeanese,^[2] which is an ethnic group originating from Kangean Island in the Kangean Islands region, north of the Bali Sea.^[3][4][5] It is native to Kangean and the surrounding islands. Kangean lies to the north of Bali, the northwest of Lombok and the east of Madura. The Kangean language is closely related to Madurese and partly mutually intelligible with it, and is often considered a dialect of Madurese.^[6]

Writing System

Examined from an ethnolinguistic point of view (so far) from the discovery of inscriptions in the Kangean Islands, the original Kangean language is not known or it can be concluded that so far it does not have its own traditional script. From time to time, the use of scripts from other languages was used to write Kangean-language literature, including the Carakan (Javanese), Lontaraq, Mangkasaraq, Pegon, and Latin scripts which are now very dominantly used.

Latin

The Kangean language is now generally written in the 26-letter Latin script, but the use of the letters X and Z is generally rare in everyday life except in names. In Dutch colonial times, the Latin script used in Kangean had diacritics like the Latin script for Old Javanese used to distinguish sounds in words; for example, the word tepaq (transl. har. "appropriate") used to be written as tĕppaq, but nowadays Kangean tends to be written without diacritics and has undergone spelling standardization following Javanese spelling but simpler (for example, the word bathik in Javanese would be spelled as batik in Kangean).

References