Sulawesi Language Alliance

Championing Local Languages in the Heart of Indonesia

Language Group

Overview
ISO 639-3: 
bup
Population: 
2300 (2000)
Microgroup: 
Province: 
Southeast Sulawesi
Overall Vitality: 
3/Definitely Endangered

Location and Population

Busoa is spoken by an estimated 2,300 people in two coastal villages, Busoa and Laompo, in the southwestern corner of Buton Island some twenty kilometers south of the city of Baubau (Andersen 2006:6). For the location of these villages, see the sketch map in Van den Berg (1991:51).

Classification

Based on short word lists collected in the 1980s, Busoa was classified as a Munan language (Van den Berg 1991; Donohue 2004:33).

References

Andersen, T. David. 2006. Suku bahasa di Sulawesi Tenggara. Unpublished typescript, 11 pp. 

Berg, René van den. 1991. Muna dialects and Munic languages: Towards a reconstruction. VICAL 2: Western Austronesian and contact languages: papers from the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, edited by Ray Harlow, 21–51. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand.

Donohue, Mark. 2004. The pretenders to the Muna-Buton group. Papers in Austronesian subgrouping and dialectology (Pacific Linguistics, 563), edited by John Bowden and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, 21–35. Canberra: Australian National University.

Vitality

Summary

 

Discussion

In 1993 René van den Berg began working with Busoa speakers to document the language through a dictionary, grammar sketch and text collection. He communicates that Busoa is no longer being learned by children, for which reason we rate Busoa as 3/Definitely Endangered.

What Others Have Written

René van den Berg (2011:pers.comm.)

Bilingualism is very high in Busoa, and in the few homes that I visited the parents spoke in Indonesian to their children. The younger generation still has a passive knowledge of the language, but most don't use it among themselves. In 2009 I was told that the capital of the new Batauga Regency will be based in Busoa, which will probably have a fatal effect on the language.

Wurm (2007:482)

No literacy in it. Under pressure of the large Wolio and Cia-Cia languages, and of Indonesian. At least potentially endangered, moving towards being endangered.

References

Wurm, Stephen A. 2007. Australasia and the Pacific. Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages, edited by Christopher Moseley, 425–577. New York: Routledge.

Documentation

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