The language 5
cludes some 500+ languages of western Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Ma-
lagasy language of Madagascar. On the basis of lexical and phonological evi-
dence, it has been determined that Madurese is most closely related to Sunda-
nese, Balinese, Malay/Indonesian, Sasak, Sumbawa, and Chadic, which is
evident its morphology and syntax as well.
This work might perhaps be better titled A Grammar of the Language of
Bangkalan, Madura because the Madurese described here is predominately the
Madurese spoken in Western Madura, more specifically that in the regency of
Bangkalan. In this, this work differs from most that predate it. The Eastern di-
alect is the recognized standard, the Madurese spoken in the regency of Sume-
nep, where the principle palace of the Majapahit era and earlier ‘dynasties’ is
located. The attitude regarding the prestige dialect is widely held, even among
the people of other dialect areas. However, as is true of any language with a
significant number of speakers spread over a large geographical area, identify-
ing a homogeneous standard can actually be somewhat controversial, or, at
least, misleading. The fact is that the majority of Madurese live outside the isl-
and of Madura and speak distinct forms of the language. All, however, are
speakers of Madurese. The situation is not unlike that found with most languag-
es, and closely parallels the case of Javanese: Central Javanese, the language of
the royal court in Solo and Yogyagarta, is taken to be the standard and differs in
a number of respects from the Javanese spoken elsewhere on the island.
Speakers of the Western dialect tend to characterize themselves as very
straightforward and direct, saying what is on their minds without equivocation
(in a way reflecting what some outsiders say of the Madurese in general). They
impressionistically characterize their speech as sonically more clipped, spoken
at a high volume. Eastern Madurese are considered more soft spoken and re-
fined, given more to circumlocution. But these are gross generalizations, given
here in the terms used by the Madurese to describe themselves. As this is not
intended to be a dialect study, no effort is made to evaluate or interpret these
characterizations. In fact, while some lexical differences such as those cited
above are identified in what follows, no concerted effort is made to exhaustively
document the differences between the Bangkalan and Sumenep varieties. Such
description is properly the province of a concerted dialect study. Some dialectal
differences in pronunciation have been documented recently in Sutoko et al.
1998.
As might be expected given the close proximity of Bangkalan to Surabaya
(30 minutes by ferry and as of 2009 connected by the Suramadu Bridge), there
is somewhat more influence of Javanese on Western Madurese than in points
further east on the island (but likely no more than the Madurese of the 3 million
plus speakers living in East Java).