Amis ( or ) is a Formosan language of the Amis (or Ami), an indigenous people living along the east coast of Taiwan. Amis is the largest of the Formosan languages. It is spoken between Hualien in the north and Taitung in the south, with another population of speakers in the Hengchun Peninsula near the southern end of the island. The northern varieties are considered tobe separate languages.
Government services in counties where many Amis people live in Taiwan broadcast in Amis alongside Mandarin, such as the Hualien and Taitung railway stations. However, few Amis under the age of 20 in 1995 spoke the language. It is not known how many of the 200,000 ethnic Amis speak the language. A third of the aboriginal Taiwanese population speaks Amis.
Amis is a dialect cluster. There are five dialects: Southern Amis, Tavalong-Vataan, Central Amis, Chengkung-Kwangshan, and Northern Amis (Nanshi Amis, which includes Nataoran).
Sakizaya is a moribund language spoken among the northernmost ethnic Amis. It is not mutually intelligible with the Northern Amis dialect.
The following discussion covers the central dialect of Amis.
The epiglottal consonants have proven difficult to describe, with some sources describing them as pharyngeal or even uvular as opposed to epiglottal. It is unclear if is a separate phoneme from or if it's just an allophone of it. The voiceless pharyngeal fricative is a word-final allophone of .
The voiceless plosives and the affricate are released in clusters, so that cecay "one" is pronounced ; as is : sepat "four" is . The glottal stop is an exception, frequently having no audible release in final position. The voiced fricatives, (the latter found only in loanwords) are devoiced to in utterance-final and sometimes initial position. may be interdental or post-dental. The sibilants, , are optionally palatalized () before . does not occur in word-initial position. is often post-alveolar, and in final position it is released: "fog".
shows dramatic dialectal variation. In Fengbin, a town in the center of Amis territory, it is pronounced as a median dental fricative, , whereas in the town of Kangko, only away, it is a lateral . In Northern Amis, it is a plosive , which may be laxed to intervocalically. The epiglottals are also reported to have different pronunciations in the north, but the descriptions are contradictory. In Central Amis, is always voiceless and is often accompanied by vibrations that suggest it involves an epiglottal trill . Edmondson and Elsing report that these are true epiglottals initially and medially, but in utterance-final position they are epiglottoâÂÂpharyngeal.
Sakizaya, considered to be a separate language, contrasts a voiced with voiceless .
In the practical orthography, is written , , , , , , and .
Amis has three common vowels, . Despite the fact that a great deal of latitude is afforded by only needing to distinguish three vowels, Amis vowels stay close to their cardinal values, though there is more movement of and toward each other (tending to the range) than there is in front-vowel space (in the range).
A voiceless epenthetic schwa optionally breaks up consonant clusters, as noted above. However, there are a small number of words where a short schwa (written e) may be phonemic. However, no contrast involving the schwa is known, and if it is also epenthetic, then Amis has words with no phonemic vowels at all. Examples of this e are malmes "sad", pronounced , and âÂÂnem "six", pronounced or .
Stress regularly falls on the final syllable.
Verbs in the Amis language have some inflections including existential clause, active voice, passive voice, disposal sentence, imperative mood, optative mood, and prohibitive mood.
Cases are marked by case particles.
There are two word orders in Amis called "General" Word Order and "Special" Word Order.
Below are some examples of Amis sentence:
Sing Olam (2011:300âÂÂ301) lists the following Amis names for villages and towns in Hualien County and Taitung County of eastern Taiwan.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights translated into Pangcah: