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How Sundanese packages meaning
Sundanese grammar at a glance
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Common questions about Sundanese
How does Sundanese politeness work?
Sundanese has two main levels: basa loma (informal, with peers and family) and basa lemes (polite, with strangers and elders). Lemes further splits by directionality: lemes ka sorangan ('humble' vocabulary about self) uses self-deprecating words; lemes ka batur ('respectful' vocabulary about others) uses elevated words. Hundreds of basic words have separate forms for each register.
What are Sundanese voice prefixes?
Sundanese has five productive voice morphemes. N- marks active (actor is subject). di- marks passive. ti- marks accidental ('it happened to fall'). ka- marks resultative ('be in the state of having Xed'). The suffix -keun creates applicatives and causatives. The same root takes different combinations to express different perspectives on the event.
Is Sundanese related to Javanese?
Both Sundanese and Javanese are Austronesian languages spoken on the island of Java — Sundanese in West Java, Javanese in Central and East Java. They share a common ancestor and many vocabulary cognates, but they aren't mutually intelligible. Sundanese has fewer speech levels than Javanese (two main + sub-distinctions vs Javanese's three + krama inggil). Both live alongside Indonesian as the national lingua franca.
Does Sundanese have grammatical gender?
No. Sundanese nouns and pronouns don't mark gender. The 3rd-person pronoun manéhna (loma) / anjeunna (lemes) means 'he' or 'she'. Adjectives don't change shape. The lack of gender is consistent across most Austronesian languages — Sundanese, Javanese, Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog all share this pattern.
Why does Sundanese have separate vocabulary for talking about yourself vs. others?
Sundanese politeness separates elevating others from lowering oneself as two moves. lemes ka batur ('respectful to others') uses formal words for the listener's actions and possessions. lemes ka sorangan ('humble about self') uses self-deprecating words for the speaker. The same sentence might use both: 'I will eat (humble) at your home (respectful)'. The system makes social hierarchy visible at every turn.
Sources for Sundanese
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Robins, R. H. (1959). "Nominal and Verbal Derivation in Sundanese." Lingua, 8, 337-369.
- Muller-Gotama, Franz (2001). "Sundanese." Languages of the World/Materials 369. Lincom Europa.
- Hardjadibrata, R. R. (1985). "Sundanese: A Syntactical Analysis." Pacific Linguistics, Series D-65. Australian National University.
- Kats, J. & Soeriadiradja, M. (1982). "Tata Bahasa dan Ungkapan Bahasa Sunda." Djambatan, Jakarta.