Konferensi Linguistik Tahunan Atma Jaya 17 1 HOW TO WRITE IMPLOSIVES IN KODI Misriani Balle & Joseph Lovestrand Yayasan Suluh Insan Lestari ABSTRAK/ABSTRACT Kodi is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 20,000 people living in the western part of the island of Sumba (NTT, Indonesia). In 2018, a project was launched to publish school curriculum in Kodi for a multilingual education program. This requires a standardized writing system for Kodi. One challenge for writing Kodi is that, unlike Indonesian, Kodi does not have any voiced stops; but it does have a set of implosive stops. We found three competing proposals for how to write implosive sounds. One is to use the grapheme used for the voiced stop sounds in Indonesian, co-opting <b> and <d> for the bilabial and alveolar implosives. A second proposal is to use a digraph combining the letter <h> with the grapheme representing a stop at the relevant place of articulation: <bh> and <dh>. A third proposal is to use an apostrophe as a diacritic: <b’> and <d’>. We employed three methods for working with Kodi speakers in order to come to a consensus on how to write implosives sounds. First, we worked with Kodi speakers in a two-day participatory workshop for alphabet design. Second, we designed a survey to informally check the opinions of Kodi speakers on competing proposals for writing words with implosives. Third, we organized a consultative meeting to invite the opinion of key stakeholders in the community. Through this process, we came to the tentative conclusion that there is enough community consensus to move forward with the use of the digraphs, <bh> and <dh>, to write implosives in Kodi. However, a recent publication in Kodi has caused us to re- evaluate the possible advantages of using <b> and <d> for implosives. Keywords: Kodi, Sumba, Orthography INTRODUCTION An effort to standardize the Kodi orthography is currently be carried out by the Indonesian non-profit foundation Suluh Insan Lestari in partnership with local primary schools as part of a government- sponsored program for innovation in children’s education called Inovasi. The project aims to create educational literature in Kodi for use in mother-tongue-based multilingual education, and therefore requires a standardized writing system for publishing literacy material in Kodi. This paper describes aspects of that process, and is organized as follows. First, the Kodi language and its phonology is introduced. Second, previous orthographic systems that we discovered during this process are described, focusing on the issue of writing implosive sounds. Then we describe three activities we carried out in order to increase community input in the orthography standardization process. Finally, we re-evaluate our conclusion, and consider the prospect of a long term process of standardization. KODI PHONOLOGY Kodi is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 20,000 people living in the western part of the island of Sumba (NTT, Indonesia) (Simons & Fenning 2018). The eight languages of Sumba, along with the language of the nearby islands of Savu, together form the Sumba-Sabu group of related Malayo- Polynesian languages whose relationship to the rest of the language family is not entirely clear (Grimes et al. 1997: 67–76; Blust 2008; Klamer 2009). Like most languages of Sumba, relatively little research has been done on Kodi phonology and grammar. Hoskins’ (1994) anthropological work includes a two-page description of a transcription system. A brief overview of the phonemes is included in a short article by Ekayani, Mbete & Putra (2014), as well as in the introduction to the MA thesis of Ghanggo Ate (2018: 5– 7). On the topic of Kodi syntax, the MA thesis by Ghanggo Ate (2018) describes reduplication, with reference to syllabic structures and prosody. An MA thesis by Sukerti (2014) discusses grammatical relations, as does a paper by the same authors (Sukerti & Ghanggo Ate 2016). Our own research on Kodi phonology (Lovestrand & Balle in prep.) concludes that Kodi has five vowels (/a, e, i, o, u/) and twenty consonants, although three of the consonants are marginal. Table 1 shows the twenty consonants. The three in parentheses have dubious phonemic status. Where the choice of grapheme is relatively uncontroversial, the grapheme for each consonant in shown in angled brackets following the phonetic symbol.