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Sundanese linguistic data
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Common questions about Sundanese
What linguistic data does this Sundanese page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Sundanese's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Sundanese data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
How do Sundanese speech levels compare to Javanese?
Both have multi-tier register systems where vocabulary swaps wholesale across formality levels, but the structures differ in detail. Sundanese has loma (intimate/everyday) and lemes (refined/respectful), with intermediate gradations. The systems aren't directly translatable — switching between Sundanese and Javanese registers means picking the equivalent level in each system.
What's the Sundanese script?
Aksara Sunda is the indigenous Brahmic abugida historically used for Sundanese, dating to the 14th century. Latin orthography displaced it during the colonial period, but Aksara Sunda has been revived in regional education and signage in West Java since the 1990s. Most contemporary Sundanese is written in Latin.
Why does Sundanese cluster with Javanese on similarity scores?
Both are Western Malayo-Polynesian Austronesian languages spoken on the same island, sharing SVO typology, similar morphology, overlapping core vocabulary, and parallel speech-level systems. Geographic and historical contact has reinforced overlap. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
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.