ABSTRACT
Javanese is one of the Austronesian languages, belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroup and the Sundic family. In keeping with the other members of the subgroup, most Javanese root words consist of two syllables, and from these grammatical variants are derived by means of affixes, as described in Section 4. Austronesian languages use reduplication of words to indicate the plural and other grammatical concepts, and the use of reduplication in Javanese will be discussed in Section 5. The Austronesian languages in general exhibit a high ratio of vowels to consonants. Other Sundic languages are Sundanese, Tenggerese, Osing, Madurese and Balinese, which are all spoken on or near the island of Java. Nothofer, reported in Kaswanti Purwo (1993: 245), estimates that Javanese is about 37 per cent cognate with Madurese, and about 33 per cent cognate with Sundanese. An ancestor language for Javanese, Proto-Malayo-Javanic, has been reconstructed by Nothofer (1975).
