Semai (engrok Semai) is aAustroasiatic language of westernMalaysia spoken by about 60,438Semai people. It is one of the fewAslian languages which are not endangered, and even has 2,000 monolingual speakers. It is currently spoken by 3 main groups; the Northern Semai, Central Semai and the Southern Semai.
One notable aspect of Semaiphonology is its highly irregular pattern of expressivereduplication, showing discontiguous copying from just the edges of the reduplicant's base, thus forming a minorsyllable.
Asli (2017),[3] a film directed by David Liew, is about abi-racial girl on a road to discover her cultural heritage, is the first film to use the Semai language in 50% of its dialogue.[4]
Diffloth, Gerard. 1976a. Minor-Syllable Vocalism in Senoic Languages. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.),Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, 229–247. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
Diffloth, Gerard. 1976b. Expressives in Semai. In Philip N. Lenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta (eds.),Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, 249–264. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.
Hendricks, Sean. 2001. Bare-Consonant Reduplication Without Prosodic Templates: Expressive Reduplication in Semai.Journal of East Asian Linguistics 10: 287–306.
Phillips, Timothy C. 2013. Linguistic Comparison of Semai Dialects. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2013-010: 1–111.
