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• Hull, Geoffrey. 1998. "The basic lexical affinities of Timor's Austronesian languages: a preliminary investigation."Studies in Languages and Cultures of East Timor 1:97-202.

Classification:

Amarasi is a Malayo-Polynesian language with strong Melanesian roots, and additional Dutch and Portuguese influences. It belongs to a language group known as Timoric (sometimes Timor-Babar) that includes all the languages spoken on the island of Timor, as well as the nearby islands of Wetar and Babar. The most common languages in the Timor-Babar language group are Uab Meto (previously known as Dawan) on the western half of the island, and Tetum on the eastern half of the island. These languages have over a million speakers between them. Most Timoric languages are separated into east and west because of the island's conflicted colonial history beginning in the early 16th century.

In 1998, Australian linguist Geoffrey Hull classified Amarasi (in addition to many other Timor-Babar languages, including Helong, Roti, Bilba, Dengka, Lole, Ringgou, Dela-Oenale, Termanu, and Tii) as dialects of Uab Meto proper, rather than their own separate languages. However, beginning in the mid-2000's, as linguists began to study the differences between Uab Meto and its "dialects," it was understood that there was low mutual intelligibility between the smaller Timoric languages, due mostly to vastly differing grammar structures and foreign language influences (such as Dutch and Portuguese in Amarasi), and so many linguists now recognize the smaller Timoric languages to be independant languages belonging to a common Uab Meto language chain.

Although Helong is considered an independent language from Amarasi, it's understood to be an eastern variant of it. Its main difference is that Helong has more borrowed Portuguese words, and fewer borrowed Dutch words than its western cousin, Amarasi.

• From Owen Edwards (2016). Amarasi. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 46, pp 113-125 doi:10.1017/S0025100315000377

About 80,000 speakers.

4 dialects: Ro'is, Kotos, Tais Nonof and Ketun. Many differences exists within each dialect between individual villages.

Has 13 consonants and five vowels. Consonants have five places of articulation and 4 manners of articulation.

It has an SOV grammar structure.

**see if I can get that chart

CONSONANTS

Consonants can appear at any position in the word, except for [d͡ʒ] and [g], which are limited to "the morpheme boundary of certain enclitics and in a handful of lexemes, mostly loans."

Words beginning with a vowel are spoken with an initial glottal stop, but when prefixes are added, vowel-inital words drop the glottal stop, whereas glottal-initial words keep it (between the prefix and the root).

Voiced plosives are often replaced with voiced fricatives or approximants.

"The alveolar nasal /n/ assimilates to the place of a following plosive in non-careful speech, with the exception of the labial plosives /p/ and /b/, before which such assimilation has not been observed in Amarasi."

Amarasi is characterized by unusual consonant clusters, such as glottal-stop--initial clusters.

"Words may begin with a maximum of two consonants in Amarasi."

**see if I can get that chart

No more than two consonants can form a cluster.

Two of the same consonant cannot begin a root.

Consonant clusters are seldom formed from the same place of articulation, an common exception being the /mf/ cluster.

Nearly all rule restrictions have at least one exception.

A glottal stop can only be in the first position of a consonant cluster. The glottal fricative /h/ and the alveolar trill /r/ cannot be in the first position of a cluster.

Amarasi contains several prefixes that consist of a single consonant. The most common of these are [ʔ-], [t-], [m-], and [n-].

The vowel [a] is often placed between the prefix and the root, if the root begins with a consonant cluster, to avoid a 3-consonant-cluster.

VOWELS

**see if I can get that chart

Morphology

Amarasi is characterized by unusual, sometimes unique, consonant clusters. Consonant clusters contain no more than two consonants, which cannot be the same if the cluster is beginning a word. Consonants may appear in any order in a cluster, with the exception of /ʔ/, which must occupy the first position; and /h/ and /r/ which must occupy the second position. Because there are several single-consonant prefixes (the most common being /ʔ-/, /t-/, /m-/, and /n-/) and the restriction of a 3-consonant cluster beginning a word, the vowel /a/ is often used as a "buffer" between the prefix and the word-initial consonant cluster. Single-consonant prefixes attach to words beginning with a single consonant with no additional morphological rules.