Sama–Bajaw languages
These classifications are rarely recognized by Sama themselves who instead classify their Sinama by the village or island it originates from.
Locations and demographics are from Palleson (1985)[3] and Ethnologue (individual languages with separately assigned ISO codes highlighted in bold).
Capul Island is located in the San Bernardino Strait, which separates Samar from the Bicol Peninsula of Luzon.
Ethnologue lists the following population statistics for Borneo Coast Bajau.
[1] Miller (2014) says that there are three main voice alternations in Sama-Bajaw:[6] In many Philippine languages, the UV construction is said to be basic.
For example, in Sama Bangingi’ the non-AV actor is typically a pronominal clitic in first or second person.
In the Sulu, SVO is only found in the context of preposed negatives and aspect markers.
In West Coast Bajau, on the other hand, SVO word-order is also found in pragmatically neutral contexts.
The word order is represented in terms of the semantic roles: actor (A) and undergoer (U).
Miller (2007) suggests that verb-initial order in West Coast Bajau UV clauses strongly correlates with foregrounding.
[1] He argues that this is the basic word order given that the undergoer in final position does not have a specific pragmatic status.
Where verb-initial clauses in AV do occur, however, they typically represent key sequences of action in the storyline.
Consequently, Miller (2007: 211) analyses the clause structure of West Coast Bajau as follows:[1] Pragmatic structure of West Coast Bajau The preverbal focus position can be followed by focus particles such as no.
[citation needed] The consonants of the Sinama languages are represented by the letters b, d, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, ng, p, r, s, t, w, y and '.
Linguists have suggested the use of an apostrophe-like character (⟨'⟩) for word final glottal stops.
Other Sinama languages have chosen to follow Tagalog orthography and to leave this vowel medial glottal stop ambiguous.
Sinama speakers often spell the word final glottal stop with an h at the end.
Sinama speakers in Malaysia may also spell it with a ⟨k⟩ following the vowel softening patterns of Bahasa Melayu.
In addition to these five vowels ə, and ɤ are found in one or more Sinama language.
[3]: 124 Stress will remain on the penultimate syllable even with the addition of suffixes including enclitic pronouns.
In Northern Sinama (Balanguingi') the stress will shift to the ultima when the penult is the mid central vowel /ə/.
Still others write this keeping the noun/verb separate from the prounoun e.g. luma' ta for 'our house' in Northern Sinama.
Pallesen (1985) considers the homeland of Proto-Sama-Bajaw to be in the Basilan Strait area, around 800 AD.
