Uab Meto (Dawan) Alphabet

Uab Meto is written in Latin script, often with Indonesian-influenced spellings, but it has no standardized orthography. The sound inventory and spelling vary by dialect: Molo has seven vowel phonemes and includes a glottal-stop consonant, and a published practical orthography for Miomafo distinguishes close-mid vowels with é and ó and writes an affricate with j. Loanwords also use sounds and spellings beyond the native inventory. Some published practical spellings use é and ó, so an ordinary keyboard may need accent shortcuts or a character picker for them.

The one character that is not a plain letter is the glottal stop, the catch in the throat heard in the middle of English uh-oh. It is a real consonant that can distinguish words; practical spellings often represent it with an apostrophe, while linguists write it as ʔ in the IPA.

The language has several names. Speakers call it Uab Meto; in Indonesia it is best known as bahasa Dawan, an outsider's name; in the Oecusse enclave of Timor-Leste its variety is called Baikeno. Uab means speech or language, and meto means dry: the Atoni call themselves Atoni Pah Meto, the people of the dry land.

How to type the Uab Meto glottal stop: ' ʼ ’ and ʔ

Everyday writing uses the plain keyboard apostrophe ' (U+0027), which every phone and computer has next to Enter or behind the 123 key. Phones often turn it into the curly ’ (U+2019) as you type; that is fine for messages, and on an iPhone you can switch it off under Settings, General, Keyboard, Smart Punctuation if you want the straight one.

For text meant to represent a glottal stop, ʼ is Unicode’s modifier letter apostrophe (U+02BC); that character choice alone does not guarantee how a specific tool will search, sort or select a word. In Microsoft Word type 02BC and press Alt+X; in HTML write ʼ. The phonetic letter ʔ is 0294 then Alt+X in Word, or ʔ in HTML.

Whatever you choose, use one form throughout a text. A word spelled with ' in one place and ’ in another may look similar, but these are distinct characters and software can handle them differently.

Words that change their shape: Uab Meto metathesis

Uab Meto is famous among linguists for metathesis: many words have two forms in which the last vowel and the consonant before it swap places, depending on what follows the word in the phrase. A word like fatu (stone) can also appear as faut. Both are forms of the same word, but metathesis is conditioned by grammatical and phonological context rather than free spelling choice.

That is one reason the language looks so different from its neighbours on paper even though it shares a lot of vocabulary with them. Its closest relatives are the languages of Rote; Helong is a more distant relative, and Tetum is another Austronesian language of Timor.

Where Uab Meto is spoken

Uab Meto is the largest language of western Timor, in the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. It is spoken across the hills and plains of Kupang regency, South Central Timor around Soe and North Central Timor around Kefamenanu, and in the Oecusse enclave on the north coast, which belongs to Timor-Leste. CLDR lists 760,000 as the language population for Uab Meto in Indonesia, intended to approximate literate, functional users rather than all speakers; other speaker estimates differ.

Its dialects are named after the old princedoms of the island: Amarasi, Amfoan, Amanuban, Amanatun, Mollo, Miomaffo, Insana, Biboki and, across the border, Baikeno. Mutual intelligibility varies, and some varieties are not mutually intelligible; no standardized orthography is shared by all varieties. Church life is one of the places where the language is written: it was first put on paper by missionaries, who translated religious material into it.

For the national language and the rest of Indonesia's characters and emoji, see Indonesian and Indonesia; for the other side of the border, see Tetum, Portuguese and Timor-Leste.