Madurese

Madurese has a series of aspirated consonants — bh, dh, jh, gh — which neither Javanese nor Malay possesses, and which is the quickest identifying mark in writing. Its vowel inventory is larger too. Its closeness to Javanese is one of relatedness and contact, not descent: Madurese is not a variety of Javanese, although its borrowed vocabulary is large.

Its levels are three: èngghi-bhunten the most refined, èngghi-enten in the middle, and ènjhâ'-iyâ for daily use, with the Sumenep variety held the most refined. The system parallels the Javanese one and most of its refined vocabulary is borrowed from Javanese, which reflects the relation of the Madurese courts to Mataram.

Madurese is written chiefly in Pegon, an adapted Arabic script, rather than in Javanese script, though the latter was also used around the Sumenep court. The choice states where writing took place: in Madura the centre of literacy is the pesantren, not the palace, and what is written is kitab, primbon, verse and teaching notes.

As a result, the written Madurese corpus has largely never entered any manuscript catalogue. It sits with families and pesantren, copied and used, and unreported to institutions. This should be said whenever anyone compares “manuscript counts” across regional languages: what is being compared is registration, and a language whose literacy runs outside state and court institutions will always appear poorer than it is.

The second thing shaping this language's condition is where its speakers are. Madurese speakers outside Madura — in the Tapal Kuda of East Java, in West Kalimantan, and in the large cities — outnumber those on the home island, and transmission in the diaspora runs at very different strengths from place to place.