Totoli

Tolitoli Bay
Tolitoli bay

Totoli is an endangered language of northern Central Sulawesi still spoken by at most 5000 speakers. It is commonly considered a member of the Tomini-Tolitoli group, although it is still unclear whether these languages actually form a genetic group or whether they are just geographically related.

Totoli differs considerably from the other languages of that group with respect to phonology, lexicon and grammar. Conspicuous phonological differences include the frequent occurrence of geminates and the tolerance for closed syllables. Grammatically, Totoli appears to have a unique voice and applicative system which com¬bines features of a typical Philippine-type voice system with features of the applicative systems found in western Indonesia and the southern half of Sulawesi. Although the system is far from being fully understood, it has been suggested that Totoli plays a key role in understanding the change of Philippine-type systems to the kind of symmetrical voice systems found in most west¬ern Indonesian languages (Wolff 1996).

Commonly assumed genetic affiliation of Totoli

Fig.1: Commonly assumed genetic affiliation of Totoli according to ethnologue.com

References

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Blust, Robert, 1991, The Greater Central Philippines Hypothesis. In Oceanic Linguistics 30/1: 73-129.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P., 1991, Tomini-Tolitoli Sound Structures. In James N. Sneddon, ed., Studies in Sulawesi Languages, Part II.

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Wolff, John U. 1996, The Development of the Passive Verb with Pronominal Prefix in Western Austronesian languages. In Bernd Nothofer, ed., Reconstruction, Classification, Description — Festschrift in Honor of Isidore Dyen. Hamburg: Abera-Verlag.