Seediq language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seediq
Spoken in	Taiwan
Region	central, eastern, and coastal
Total speakers	4,750
Language family	Austronesian Northern Formosan Atayalic Seediq
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	–
ISO 639-3	trv
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Seediq is an Austronesian language spoken in the mountains of Northern Taiwan by the Seediq and Truku people. There are 4,750 speakers.

The Truku dialect, transcribed Taroko in Chinese, gives its name to the Taroko Gorge.

The language has 19 consonants and 5 vowels. It is written in the Latin alphabet.

[edit] Syntax

The word order of Seediq is VOS, where S corresponds to the argument marked with absolutive case. This argument ordinarily occurs clause-finally, but may be followed by a topicalized ergative argument. Like many of its other Austronesian relatives, Seediq contains voice morphemes marked on the verb which indicate which of the verb's arguments (agent, patient, etc.) is treated as the subject and thus marked with absolutive case.

[edit] External links

• Ethnologue: Languages of the World
• The alphabets of written Taiwanese aboriginal languages and the corresponding sounds in IPA
• Some notes by a speaker of Truku