Bunun language Totally Explained

Everything about The Bunun Language totally explained

The Bunun language (布農語) is spoken by the Bunun people of Taiwan. It belongs to the Formosan languages, a subgroup of the Austronesian language family, and is subdivided in five dialects: Isbukun, Takbunuaz, Takivatan, Takibaka and Takituduh. Isbukun, the dominant dialect, is mainly spoken in the south of Taiwan. Takbunuaz and Takivatan are mainly spoken in the center of the country. Takibaka en Takituduh both are northern dialects. A sixth dialect, Takipulan, went extinct in the 1970s.
The Saaroa and Kanakanabu, two smaller minority groups who share their territory with an Isbukun Bunun group, have also adopted Bunun as their vernacular.

Linguistic profile

Bunun is a verb-initial language and has an Austronesian alignment system or focus system. This means that Bunun clauses don't have a nominative-accusative or absolutive-ergative alignment, but that arguments of a clause are ordered according to which participant in the event described by the verb is 'in focus'. In Bunun, four distinct roles can be in focus:

the agent: the person or thing that's doing the action or achieving/maintaining a state;
the undergoer: the person or thing that's somehow participating in the action without being an agent; there are three kinds of undergoers:
- patients: persons or things to whom an action is done or an event happens
- instruments: things (sometimes persons) which are used to perform an action
- beneficiaries (also called recipients): the persons (sometimes things) for whom an action is done or for whom an event happens
the locative participant: the location where an action takes place; in languages with a Philippine-style voice system, spatial location is often at the same level in a clause as agents and patients, rather than being an adverbial clause, like in English (see for a discussion of location in Tagalog). Which argument is in focus is indicated on the verb by a combination of prefixes and suffixes .
a verb in agent focus is often unmarked, but can get the prefix ma- or - more rarely - pa- or ka-
a verb in undergoer focus gets a suffix -un
a verb locative focus gets a suffix -an Many other languages with a focus system have different marking for patients, instruments and beneficiaries, but this isn't the case in Bunun. The focussed argument in a Bunun clause will normally always occur immediately after the verb (for example in an actor-focus clause, the agent will appear before any other participant) and is in the Isbukun dialect marked with a post-nominal marker a.

Bunun has a very large class of auxiliary verbs. Concepts that are expressed by auxiliaries include:

negation (ni 'be not' and uka 'have not')

modality and volition (for example maqtu 'can, be allowed')

relative time (for example ngausang 'first, beforehand', qanaqtung 'be finished')

comparison (maszang 'the same, similarly')

question words (for example via 'why?')

sometimes numerals (for example tatini '(be) alone, (be) only one') In fact, Bunun auxiliaries express all sorts of concepts that in English would be expressed by adverbial phrases, with the exception of time and place, which are normally expressed with adverbial phrases. Bunun is an agglutinative language and has a very elaborate set of derivational affixes (more than 200), most of which derive verbs from other word classes. Some of these prefixes are special in that they don't only occur in the verb they derive, but are also foreshadowed on a preceding auxiliary. These are called lexical prefixes or anticipatory prefixes and only occur in Bunun and a small number of other Formosan languages.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Bunun Language'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://bunun_language.totallyexplained.com">Bunun language Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.