[4] The Sasak are not the only ethnic group in Lombok; about 300,000 Balinese people live primarily in the western part of the island and near Mataram, the provincial capital of West Nusa Tenggara.

[5] In urban areas with more ethnic diversity there is some language shift towards Indonesian, mainly in the forms of code-switching and mixing rather than an abandoning of Sasak.

[6][7] Sasak's closest sister language is Sumbawa and, with Balinese, they form the Balinese-Sasak-Sumbawa (BSS) subgroup.

[17] Clauses involving the nasal verb form are predominantly subject-verb-object (SVO), similar to actor-focus classes in other western Indonesian languages.

[21] The nasal prefix can also turn a noun into the corresponding verb; for example, kupi ('coffee') becomes ngupi ('to drink coffee').

[22] For example, eastern dialects of Sasak have three types of nasalization: the first marks transitive verbs, the second is used for predicate focus, and the third is for a durative action with a non-specific patient.

[26] For example, the possessive clitic ku (or kò or k, depending on dialect)—which means 'my' and corresponds to the pronoun aku ('I')—can attach to the noun ime ('hand') for imengku ('my hand').

[27] There are three levels in Sasak for the status of the addressee (low, mid- and high),[1] and a humble-honorific dimension which notes the relationship between the speaker and another referent.

[4] They are used in formal contexts and with social superiors, especially in situations involving mènak (the traditional upper caste, which makes up eight percent of the population).

[10] The Javanese Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire, whose sphere of influence included Lombok, probably introduced literacy to the island during the fourteenth century.

[30] The oldest surviving lontar texts date to the nineteenth century; many were collected by the Dutch and kept in libraries in Leiden or Bali.

[31] Rural Sasak read the lontar texts as part of a ritual to ensure the fertility of their farm animals.

[31] Peter K. Austin described a pepaòsan which was performed as part of a circumcision ceremony in 2002,[32] with paper copies of lontar texts rather than palm leaves.

[33] Lombok's lontar texts are written in Sasak, Kawi (a literary language based on old Javanese) or a combination of the two.

[2] The first five letters read ha, na, ca, ra and ka, giving the script its name.