Tolaki Language Alphabet

Tolaki is written in a Latin-script orthography developed for the language, with a straight apostrophe (') for the glottal stop and no accented letters. Its usual graphemes are A, B, D, E, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U and W; C and J occur in Indonesian loans, and Y is rare in borrowed words and names. In Tolaki, ng represents /ŋ/, while mb, nd and ngg represent prenasalised stops.

Written Tolaki gets its look not from its letters but from how they combine. Tolaki has prenasalised consonants, a nasal and a stop said as one sound at the start of a syllable, written mb, nd and ngg, as in Kendari and Mekongga. And Tolaki words end in a vowel, which is why its names sound the way they do: Konawe, Mekongga, Kalosara, molulo, sinonggi. Tolaki uses a straight apostrophe for the glottal stop, so the letter grid alone does not contain every character its spelling needs.

Punctuation and how to type it

Tolaki follows Indonesian punctuation. Doubled words are joined with a hyphen -, and quotations use “double quotes” outside and ‘single quotes’ inside. The straight " and ' on the keyboard are fine for everyday writing; for the curly forms, Windows users hold Alt and type 0147 for “, 0148 for ”, 0145 for ‘ and 0146 for ’ on the number pad, and Mac users press Option+[, Option+Shift+[, Option+] and Option+Shift+]. Phone keyboards usually curl the quotes on their own, or show them when you hold the quote key.

Money in Tolaki country is the Indonesian rupiah, written Rp in front of the amount with a dot for thousands (Rp10.000). The rupiah has no Unicode currency sign of its own, so the grid has none; the letters R and p are all you need.

Where Tolaki is spoken

Tolaki is the language of the Tolaki people of the mainland of Southeast Sulawesi (Sulawesi Tenggara) in Indonesia 🇮🇩, around the provincial capital Kendari and in the Konawe regencies, and in Kolaka and its neighbouring regencies on the western side of the peninsula. CLDR estimates about 370,000 speakers, nearly all of them also speaking Indonesian. The two best-known dialects carry the names of the two old Tolaki kingdoms: Konawe in the east, around Kendari, and Mekongga in the west, around Kolaka.

Tolaki belongs to the Bungku–Tolaki group of the Celebic languages of central and southeastern Sulawesi, together with neighbours such as Moronene and Mori. It is not closely related to the languages of South Sulawesi, though many Bugis families live in Kendari and Kolaka; for those letters and the Lontara script see the Buginese collection, and Makasar for the other great language of the south. For the letters of the national language see Indonesian, and for the country's flag, food and landmarks see Indonesia.

Tolaki culture in emoji: Kalosara, Lulo and sinonggi

Kalosara is the symbol of Tolaki customary law: a ring of twisted rattan (kalo, a circle) laid on a white cloth on a woven tray, brought out to open a marriage proposal, to settle a dispute or to receive honoured guests. The name joins the ring with sara, custom, and the ring stands for unity and the bond that adat creates. There is no rattan-ring emoji, so ⭕ is the closest mark to write it with.

Lulo (the verb is molulo) is the Tolaki round dance, danced at weddings, harvests and almost every celebration in Kendari: people hold hands in a long circle and step together to the music, and guests are pulled in to join. It is sent as 🧑‍🤝‍🧑💃🕺. Sinonggi is the everyday Tolaki dish of sago, the starch of the sago palm 🌴 cooked into a clear, sticky mass, rolled up with sticks and eaten with sour fish soup and vegetables 🍲🐟. The anoa, a small wild buffalo found only on Sulawesi and Buton, is a symbol of Southeast Sulawesi; 🐃 is the nearest emoji.