Tetun ( ; ; ) is an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Timor. It is one of the official languages of Timor-Leste and it is also spoken in Belu Regency and Malaka Regency, which form the eastern part of Indonesian West Timor adjoining Timor-Leste.
There are two main forms of Tetun as a language:
Ethnologue classifies Tetun Terik as a dialect of Tetun. However, without previous contact, Tetun Dili is not immediately mutually intelligible, mainly because of the large number of Portuguese origin words used in Tetun Dili. Besides some grammatical simplification, Tetun Dili has been greatly influenced by the vocabulary and to a small extent by the grammar of Portuguese, the other official language of Timor-Leste.
According to linguist Geoffrey Hull, Tetun has four dialects:
Tetun-Belu and Tetun-Terik are not spoken outside their home territories. Tetun-Prasa is the form of Tetun that is spoken throughout Timor-Leste. Although Portuguese was the official language of Portuguese Timor until 1975, Tetun-Prasa has always been the predominant lingua franca in the eastern part of the island.
In the fifteenth century, before the arrival of the Portuguese, Tetun had spread through central and eastern Timor as a contact language under the aegis of the Belunese-speaking Kingdom of Wehali, at that time the most powerful kingdom in the island. The Portuguese (present in Timor from c. 1556) made most of their settlements in the west, where Dawan was spoken, and it was not until 1769, when the capital was moved from Lifau (Oecussi) to Dili that they began to promote Tetun as an inter-regional language in their colony. Timor was one of the few Portuguese colonies where a local language, and not a form of Portuguese, became the lingua franca: this is because Portuguese rule was indirect rather than direct, the Europeans governing through local kings who embraced Catholicism and became vassals of the King of Portugal.
Following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, Indonesia invaded East Timor, declaring it "the Republic's 27th Province". The use of Portuguese was banned, and Indonesian was declared the sole official language, but the Roman Catholic Church adopted Tetun as its liturgical language, making it a focus for cultural and national identity. After the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) took over governance in 1999, Tetun (Dili) was proclaimed the country's official language, even though according to Encarta Winkler Prins it was only spoken by about 8% of the native population at the time, while the elite (consisting of 20 to 30 families) spoke Portuguese and most adolescents had been educated in Indonesian. When Timor-Leste gained its independence in 2002, Tetun and Portuguese were declared as official languages. The 2010 census found that Tetun Prasa had 385,269 native speakers on a total population of 1,053,971, meaning that the share of native Tetun Prasa/Dili speakers had increased to 36.6% during the 2000s.
In addition to regional varieties of Tetun in Timor-Leste, there are variations in vocabulary and pronunciation, partly due to Portuguese and Indonesian influence. The Tetun spoken by East Timorese migrants living in Portugal and Australia are more Portuguese-influenced, as many of those speakers were not educated in Indonesian.
The Tetun name for Timor-Leste is , which means 'Timor of the rising sun', or, less poetically, 'East Timor'; comes from 'sun' and 'to rise, to go up'. The noun for 'word' is , from 'voice' and 'fruit'. Some more words in Tetun:
Words derived from Portuguese:
As a result of Bazaar Malay being a regional lingua franca and of Indonesian being a working language, many words are derived from Malay, including:
In addition, as a legacy of Indonesian rule, other words of Malay origin have entered Tetun, through Indonesian.
However, Tetun speakers often use Malay/Indonesian or Portuguese numbers instead, such as or 'eight' instead of , especially for numbers over one thousand.
Tetun has many hybrid words, which are combinations of indigenous and Portuguese words. These often include an indigenous Tetun verb, with a Portuguese suffix -dór (similar to '-er'). For example:
A common occurrence is to use titles such as for a woman or names rather than pronouns when addressing people.
The second person singular pronoun is used generally with children, friends or family, while with strangers or people of higher social status, or is used.
The plural is not normally marked on nouns, but the word 'they' can express it when necessary.
However, the plural ending -s of nouns of Portuguese origin is sometimes retained.
Tetun has an optional indefinite article ('one'), used after nouns:
There is no definite article, but the demonstratives ('this one') and ('that one') may be used to express definiteness:
In the plural, ('these') or ('those') are used:
The particle forms the inalienable possessive, and can be used in a similar way to s in English, e.g.:
When the possessor is postposed, representing alienable possession, becomes :
Like other Austronesian languages, Tetun has two forms of we, (equivalent to Malay ) which is exclusive, e.g. "I and they", and (equivalent to Malay ), which is inclusive, e.g. "you, I, and they".
Nouns derived from verbs or adjectives are usually formed with affixes, for example the suffix -na'in, similar to "-er" in English.
The suffix -na'in can also be used with nouns, in the sense of 'owner'.
In more traditional forms of Tetun, the circumfix ma(k)- -k is used instead of -na'in. For example, the nouns 'sinner' or 'wrongdoer' can be derived from the word as either , or . Only the prefix ma(k)- is used when the root word ends with a consonant; for example, the noun 'cook' or 'chef' can be derived from the word as as well as .
The suffix -teen (from the word for 'dirt' or 'excrement') can be used with adjectives to form derogatory terms:
To turn a noun into a nominalised adjective, the word ('person, child, associated object') is added to it.
Thus, 'Timorese person' is , as opposed to the country of Timor, .
To form adjectives and actor nouns from verbs, the suffix -dór (derived from Portuguese) can be added:
Tetun does not have separate masculine and feminine gender, hence (similar to // in Malay) can mean either 'he', 'she' or 'it'.
Different forms for the genders only occur in Portuguese-derived adjectives, hence ('thank you') is used by men, and by women. The masculine and feminine forms of other adjectives derived from Portuguese are sometimes used with Portuguese loanwords, particularly by Portuguese-educated speakers of Tetun.
In some instances, the different gender forms have distinct translations into English:
In indigenous Tetun words, the suffixes ('male') and ('female') are sometimes used to differentiate between the genders:
Superlatives can be formed from adjectives by reduplication:
When making comparisons, the word ('more') is used after the adjective, optionally followed by ('than' from Portuguese ):
To describe something as the most or least, the word ('all') is added:
Adverbs can be formed from adjectives or nouns by reduplication:
The most commonly used prepositions in Tetun are the verbs ('have', 'possess', 'specific locative') and ('go', 'to', 'for'). Most prepositional concepts of English are expressed by nominal phrases formed by using , the object and the position (expressed by a noun),optionally with the possessive .
There is no verb to be as such, but the word , which translates as 'not to be', is used for negation:
The word , which roughly translates as 'who is' or 'what is', can be used with fronted phrases for focusing/ emphasis:
The interrogative is formed by using the words ('or') or ('or not').
Transitive verbs are formed by adding the prefix ha- or hak- to a noun or adjective:
Intransitive verbs are formed by adding the prefix na- or nak- to a noun or adjective:
In , verbs inflect when they begin with a vowel or consonant h. In this case mutation of the first consonant occurs. For example, the verb ('see') in would be conjugated as follows:
Whenever possible, the past tense is simply inferred from the context, for example:
However, it can be expressed by placing the adverb ('already') at the end of a sentence.
When is used with ('not') this means 'no more' or 'no longer', rather than 'have not':
In order to convey that an action has not occurred, the word ('not yet') is used:
When relating an action that occurred in the past, the word ('finally' or 'well and truly') is used with the verb.
The future tense is formed by placing the word ('will') before a verb:
The negative is formed by adding ('not') between and the verb:
The perfect aspect can be formed by using .
When negated, indicates that an action ceased to occur:
In order to convey that a past action had not or never occurred, the word ('not yet' or 'never') is used:
The progressive aspect can be obtained by placing the word ('stay') after a verb:
The imperative mood is formed using the word ('go') at the end of a sentence, hence:
The word ('just' or 'a bit') may also be used when making a request rather than a command:
When forbidding an action ('must not') or ('do not') are used:
The influence of Portuguese and to a lesser extent Malay/Indonesian on the phonology of Tetun has been extensive.
In the Tetun language, , and tend to have relatively fixed sounds. However and vary according to the environment they are placed in, for instance the sound is slightly higher if the proceeding syllable is or .
All consonants appearing in parentheses are used only in loanwords.
Stops: All stops in Tetun are un-aspirated, meaning an expulsion of breath is absent. In contrast, English stops, namely 'p' 't' and 'k' are generally aspirated.
Fricatives: is an unstable voiced labio-dental fricative and tends to alternate with or is replaced by ; e.g. â meaning 'grandparent.'
As Tetun did not have any official recognition or support under either Portuguese or Indonesian rule, it is only recently that a standardised orthography has been established by the (INL). The standard orthography devised by the institute was declared official by Government Decree 1/2004 of 14 April 2004. However, there are still widespread variations in spelling, one example being the word or 'when', which has also been written as , , , . The use of or is a reflection of the pronunciation in some rural dialects of Tetun-Terik.
The current orthography originates from the spelling reforms undertaken by Fretilin in 1974, when it launched literacy campaigns across East Timor, and also from the system used by the Catholic Church when it adopted Tetun as its liturgical language during the Indonesian occupation. These involved the transcription of many Portuguese words that were formerly written in their original spelling, for example, â 'education', and â 'colonialism'.
Reforms suggested by the International Committee for the Development of East Timorese Languages (IACDETL) in 1996 included the replacement of the digraphs and (borrowed from Portuguese, where they stand for the phonemes and ) with and , respectively (as in certain Basque orthographies), to avoid confusion with the consonant clusters and , which also occur in Tetun. Thus, 'sir' became , and 'worker' became . Later, as adopted by IACDETL and approved by the INL in 2002, and were replaced by and (as in Spanish). Thus, 'sir' became , and 'worker' became . Some linguists favoured using (as in Catalan and Filipino) and for these sounds, but the latter spellings were rejected for being similar to the Indonesian system, and most speakers actually pronounce ñ and ll as and , respectively, with a semivowel which forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel (but reduced to , after ), not as the palatal consonants of Portuguese and Spanish. Thus, , are pronounced , , and , are pronounced , . As a result, some writers use and instead, for example and for June and July ( and in Portuguese).
As well as variations in the transliteration of Portuguese loanwords, there are also variations in the spelling of indigenous words. These include the use of double vowels and the apostrophe for the glottal stop, for example â 'large' and â 'small'.
The sound , which is not indigenous to Tetun but appears in many loanwords from Portuguese and Malay, often changed to in old Tetun and to (written ) in the speech of young speakers: for example, 'table' from Portuguese , and 'shirt' from Portuguese . In the sociolect of Tetun that is still used by the generation educated during the Indonesian occupation, and may occur in free variation. For instance, the Portuguese-derived word 'example' is pronounced by some speakers, and conversely 'January' is pronounced . The sound , also not native to the language, often shifted to , as in 'work' from Portuguese (also note that a modern INL convention promotes the use of for 'work' and for 'service').