West Damar language

West Damar
North Damar
Damar Batumerah
Native toIndonesia
RegionMaluku Islands
Native speakers
(800 cited 1987)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3drn
Glottologwest2548

West Damar, or North Damar, is an Austronesian language of Damar Island, one of the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. In spite of rather low cognacy rates with its neighboring languages,[2] it can be classified as part of the Babar languages based on qualitative evidence.[3]

It is spoken in two villages (Batumerah, Kuai) located in the north-western part of Damar.[4]

  1. ^ West Damar at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ Mark Taber. 1993. Toward a better understanding of the Indigenous Languages of Southwestern Maluku. Oceanic Linguistics 32. 389-441.
  3. ^ Aone van Engelenhoven. 2010. Tentatively locating West-Damar among the languages of Southwest Maluku. In Chlenova, Svetlana and Fedorchuk, Artem (eds.), Studia Anthropologica: a Festschrift in Honor of Michael Chlenov, 297-326. Moscow-Jerusalem: Gesharim.
  4. ^ "West Damar Language or Damar-Batumerah, an Isolate in South-Eastern Indonesia" (PDF). 2015-05-12. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-05-12. Retrieved 2020-07-04.