Urak Lawoi' language
Urak Lawoi’ or Urak Lawoc (Urak Lawoi': , ) is a Malayic language spoken in southern Thailand.

The Orang (Suku) Laut who live between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula speak divergent Malayic lects, which bear some intriguing connections to various Sumatran Malay varieties.

Phonology and orthography

Vowels

 In closed syllables, some vowels change their quality:
  becomes  (  'space').
  becomes  (  'return').
  becomes  (  'stomach').
 Epenthetic  and  are added after high vowels  respectively ( 'light',  'to throw away').
 Vowels are somewhat allophonically lengthened in stressed open syllables.
 Vowels other than  are slightly nasalized after nasal consonants. If the following syllable has  as the onset, this onset is also nasalized (  'to cry',   'body, self').

Notes: In the Thai script, the left column represents diacritics for open syllables, while the right one for closed syllables. For syllables with vowel ö, before consonants k, m, n, ng, p, and t, the vowel is not written. Similarly, the diacritic for a is not used before q. Any vowels with separate closed syllable diacritics have an inherent value of  when not used with a succeeding consonant.

Consonants 

  and  allophones are influenced by Thai, whereas  is influenced by Malay.
 Aspirated consonants and  only appear in loanwords (mostly from Thai).
 Phonetically,  and  is pronounced , and  (after back vowels and ) or  (after front vowels), respectively, syllable-finally.
  becomes  after , otherwise  in syllable-final positions (  'space' vs.   'doctor').
  is compensatorily lengthened to phonetically long . In stressed positions, the vowel cluster fluctuates between .
 The coda stop  after a front vowel becomes  (  'sheep').
 Syllable-initial stops , with the same syllable containing a back vowel and coda , are labialized to  and  respectively (  'to utter').

  and  can be treated as a part of diphthongs or triphthongs.
  only exists in the Phuket dialect.

Stress and intonation 
Urak Lawoi' does not have tones, except in Thai loans. Words are usually stressed in penultimate syllable, except if the expected stress is placed on the pre-syllable (e.g. open syllables containing , but not ) the stress moves into the next syllable. Urak Lawoi' also has global intonation — for instance, interrogative sentences have rising intonation and negative sentences have lower-pitch intonation.

References

Further reading

 
 
 
 
 ศูนย์ศึกษาและฟื้นฟูภาษาและวัฒนธรรมในภาวะวิกฤต. (2020). คู่มือระบบเขียนภาษาอูรักลาโวยจอักษรไทย ฉบับมหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล. นครปฐม: สถาบันวิจัยภาษาและวัฒนธรรมเอเชีย มหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล. 

Malayic languages
Languages of Thailand