VARIANT MELANAU SARAWAK: REVIEW IN MELANAU MUKAH

This article discusses on one of the Melanau variants (VM) in Sarawak, namely the Melanau Mukah variant (VM MKH). The objective of this article is to evaluate and reorganize aspects of phonology which has yet to get clarification on a number of studies on VM MKH especially in determining the amount of phoneme inventory. Therefore, this article aims to focus on the aspects of phonetics and phonology to describe the phonological system of VM MKH that displays spread of vowel, diphthong and identify the presence of alternation in this MKH VM. The objectives of this article is achieved through the application of structural approach. The findings reported in this article is that the VM MKH has 21 consonant phonemes which consist of seven explosive consonants /p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ/, two africate consonants /tʃ, dʒ/, four fricative consonants /s, ç, ɣ, h/, four nasal consonants /m, n, ɲ, ŋ/, a vibration consonant / r /, a lateral consonant / l / and two semi-vowel consonants / w, j /, 6 vowel phonemes, namely /i, u, e, o, ə, a/ and have five diphthongs, /-oj, -aw, -aj, -ej, -uj/. Besides explaination on the VM MKH in specific, this article expands the corpus knowledge on VM in general.