[1][2] The most prominent member of this group is Makassarese, with over two million speakers in the city of Makassar and neighboring areas.

In older classifications,[3] but also in recent studies by local linguists,[4] they are considered to be dialects of the Makassarese language.

A characteristic feature of the Makassar languages is the occurrence of echo vowels with stems ending in final /r/, /l/ or /s/.

E.g. /botol/ 'bottle' is realized as bótolo in Selayar and Coastal Konjo, and as bótoloʔ in Makassarese and Highland Konjo (the latter regularly adds a glottal stop to the echo vowel).

This echo vowel is dropped if a suffix is added, but retained if followed by an enclitic.