Tetum

Why a local language became the colony's lingua franca

The Portuguese, present in Timor from about 1556, settled mostly in the west, where Dawan was spoken. Only after the capital moved from Lifau to Dili in 1769 did they promote Tetun as a language between regions. Timor was one of the few Portuguese colonies where a local language, not a form of Portuguese, became the lingua franca, because Portugal ruled indirectly through local kings who took up Catholicism.

What the occupation years did to Tetun

After Portugal's Carnation Revolution of 1974, Indonesia invaded East Timor, banned Portuguese and made Indonesian the sole official language. The Catholic Church adopted Tetun as its liturgical language, and it became a focus of national identity. When the United Nations transitional administration took over in 1999, Tetun Dili was proclaimed the official language. At independence in Timor-Leste in 2002, Tetun and Portuguese were both declared official.

How the four dialects divide

Geoffrey Hull counts four. Tetun Dili, or Tetun Prasa, is the Tetun heard throughout the country; Ethnologue counted 50,000 native speakers and 370,000 second-language users in 2004, and some researchers classify it as a Tetun-based creole, a view others dispute. Tetun Terik belongs to the south and southwest coast. Tetun Belu runs across the middle of the island and into West Timor, where the Diocese of Atambua uses it in Catholic rites. Nana'ek is the dialect of Metinaro village.

Who set the spelling

The National Institute of Linguistics devised the standard orthography, declared official by Government Decree 1/2004 of 14 April 2004. It grew from the literacy campaigns of 1974 and from the church's usage, which respelled Portuguese words: educação became edukasaun. In 2002 ñ and ll replaced the Portuguese digraphs nh and lh, so senhor became señór. Spelling still varies; 'when' appears as bainhira, bain-hira, wainhira and uaihira.