Amis
Language · official in 1 country
Sowal no ʼAmis, also called Pangcah, is spoken along the east coast of Taiwan between Hualien and Taitung, with another group of speakers on the Hengchun Peninsula near the island's southern tip. Railway stations in Hualien and Taitung make announcements in Amis beside Mandarin, although few Amis under the age of 20 spoke it in 1995.
The language on record
- Own name
- Amis
- ISO 639-3
- AMI
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Formosan
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Amis is official
Taiwan is the one country on record. Amis became official there with the other Formosan languages in July 2017.
Official beside Amis
About Amis
Which five dialects make up the cluster
Amis is a dialect cluster: Southern Amis, Tavalong-Vataan, Central Amis, Chengkung-Kwangshan and Northern Amis, which includes Nataoran. The northern varieties are considered separate languages.
Sakizaya, spoken by the northernmost ethnic Amis, is counted as a language of its own and is not mutually intelligible with Northern Amis.
What the practical spelling does with the throat sounds
Amis has epiglottal consonants that have proved hard to describe; some sources call them pharyngeal or even uvular. The practical orthography writes the epiglottal stop as ʼ and the epiglottal fricative as x, keeps ^ for the glottal stop, and uses c for /ts/, y for /j/ and d for /ɮ/. That last sound shifts across short distances: a dental fricative [ð] in Fengbin, a lateral in Kangko only 15 km away, and a plosive in Northern Amis. Stress falls on the last syllable.
Only three vowels are common, /i a u/. A short schwa, written e, may be phonemic in a few words, and if it is only inserted between consonants, then Amis has words with no phonemic vowel at all: ’nem, 'six', is pronounced [ʡnə̆m].
How an Amis sentence opens
The ordinary order puts the verb first, as in Maomahay ci wama, 'The father is working in the field', where ci marks a personal name or kin term as subject. With common nouns the subject takes ko and the object takes to, as in Mifacaʼ ko kaying to rikoʼ, 'The young woman is washing clothes'.
Common questions
Questions about Amis
Can an Amis word lack vowels entirely?
Possibly. The schwa written e may only break up consonant clusters, in which case words such as ’nem, 'six', have no phonemic vowel.
How is Sakizaya related to Amis?
It is spoken among the northernmost ethnic Amis and was once treated as an Amis dialect, but it is now counted as a separate language. Sakizaya speakers cannot follow Northern Amis without learning it, and Sakizaya has a voiced /z/ against /s/ that Central Amis lacks.