Location

Muna is spoken throughout Muna Island. It is also spoken in the Tiworo Archipelago which lies to the northwest of Muna Island; on Tobea Besar, a small island between the northern cape of Muna and the mainland of southeastern Sulawesi; on parts of the west coast of Buton Island; and on the smaller Kadatua and Siompu islands just off the coast of southwestern Buton.

Dialects

In broad terms, Muna can be divided into northern and southern dialect areas.

Northern Muna, sometimes called Standard Muna, is the variety spoken by the former Muna royalty and remains the prestige dialect, used by approximately two-thirds of the Muna population. The small Tiworo dialect, spoken on islands lying in the strait between Muna and mainland Sulawesi, is closely related to Northern Muna and could even be included as a subdialect within it.

The southern area is a dialect complex comprising several more or less closely related subdialects, of which the principal ones are Northern Gu (also spoken in Labasa and Waleale), Southern Gu, Lakudo, Mawasangka, Siompu, Talaga (reportedly spoken near Kabaena Island), Kadatua, Katobengke and Laompo, plus various others spoken north of Baubau City (Van den Berg 1989:6–8, 2004, and 2012:pers.comm.)

For language and dialect boundaries, see especially the map in Van den Berg (1989:xvii).

Population

Andersen (2006) reports 280,000 speakers of Muna or, by dialect, Northern Muna 190,000, Southern Muna 90,000.

References

Berg, René van den. 1989. A grammar of the Muna language. Dordrecht: Foris. [Digital reprint 2013 (SIL e-Books, 52), SIL International. URL: http://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/52170 (accessed January 29, 2014).]

Berg, René van den. 2004. Notes on the Southern Muna dialect. Papers in Austronesian subgrouping and dialectology (Pacific Linguistics, 563), edited by John Bowden and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, 129–169. Canberra: Australian National University.