The Busoa language of Southeast Sulawesi: Grammar sketch, texts, vocabulary

This monograph is the first linguistic description of Busoa [bup], a small endangered Austronesian language spoken on the island of Buton in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Busoa is a member of the Celebic group and closely related to its large neighbour Muna, which is one of the better-described languages of Sulawesi. This study, which is based on a limited number of days of fieldwork in the language, includes a grammatical sketch (phonology and morphosyntax), as well as 12 interlinearized texts with free translation, and a 1460-item trilingual vocabulary.

Some of the more striking features of Busoa are a large number of marginal consonants, the absence of 3rd person plural forms, a definiteness effect on verbs triggered by definite objects, a complex demonstrative system (with eight different sets), a voice opposition limited to relative clauses, and extensive valency-changing morphology.

Much more remains to be discovered about Busoa, but the present study is another step in the documentation of the linguistic richness of Sulawesi.