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Wana Modo — the language of the Ata Modo people of Komodo Island — belongs to one of humanity's most geographically expansive language families yet is spoken by only a few hundred individuals on a single island in eastern Indonesia. Carrying an ISO 639-3 code of kvh and a Glottocode of komo1261, it is formally classified within the Austronesian → Malayo-Polynesian → Central Malayo-Polynesian lineage, placed by Ethnologue and Glottolog within the Bima-Sumba grouping alongside its distant cousins Bahasa Bima and the languages of Sumba. Ethnologue's most recent edition rates it EGIDS 6b (Threatened), meaning intergenerational transmission is breaking down under sustained pressure from Bahasa Indonesia and the regionally dominant Bahasa Manggarai. The language encodes a cosmology in which humans and Komodo dragons share a common mother — knowledge that, once silenced, cannot be recovered from any external source.
Quick Facts
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Language endonym | Wana Modo ("speech of Modo") |
| Speaker ethnonym | Ata Modo ("people of Modo") |
| Island endonym | Tana Modo ("land of Modo") |
| ISO 639-3 code | kvh |
| Glottocode | komo1261 |
| Language family | Austronesian → Malayo-Polynesian → Central Malayo-Polynesian → Bima-Sumba (working label) |
| Sister languages | Bahasa Bima (Nggahi Mbojo), languages of Sumba; regionally adjacent to Bahasa Manggarai |
| Ethnologue vitality (2025) | EGIDS 6b — Threatened (Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2025) |
| Approximate speakers | Reportedly approximately 700 (Ethnologue data c. 2000); active speaker pool likely smaller today |
| Geographic range | Komodo Island; small numbers on Rinca Island and western mainland Flores |
| Writing system | Latin script (no traditional orthography) |
| Foundational documentation | Verheijen, J.A.J. (1987). Pulau Komodo: Tanah, Rakyat, dan Bahasanya. Balai Pustaka, Jakarta. |
Classification and Family Tree
Wana Modo sits within the Austronesian language family, the most geographically dispersed family on Earth, spanning from Madagascar to Hawaii and from Taiwan to New Zealand. Within that family, its established position is Malayo-Polynesian and, more narrowly, Central Malayo-Polynesian — a large grouping that covers the eastern Indonesian archipelago, including the Lesser Sunda Islands, the Moluccas, and parts of the western coast of New Guinea.
Within Central Malayo-Polynesian, Ethnologue and Glottolog assign Wana Modo to the Bima-Sumba subgroup, which also includes Bahasa Bima (spoken by roughly half a million people on Sumbawa), the languages of Sumba island, and a cluster of central Flores languages. The Glottolog 5.x classification (Grimes and Edwards 2025) places Komodo within a Flores-level node inside the broader Bima-Sumba grouping, a refinement over earlier schemes that treated the grouping more loosely. Linguists have nonetheless noted that the Bima-Sumba subgroup rests on typological and areal similarity rather than on fully demonstrated shared innovations — the standard criterion for establishing a genealogical clade. Readers should understand the label as a productive working classification rather than a settled phylogenetic proof.
What is not in any doubt is that Wana Modo is a distinct and independent language, not a dialect of either Bahasa Bima or Bahasa Manggarai. Verheijen demonstrated this against two prior misidentifications: Dutch colonial administrators and later commentators had frequently assumed the speech of Komodo Island was merely a variety of Bimanese, reflecting the island's historical subordination to the Bima Sultanate. Verheijen's comparative word lists and structural analysis showed the two languages to be non-mutually intelligible, with different phonological inventories and independent grammatical structures. Their relationship is genealogical at a higher level — likely cousins within Central Malayo-Polynesian — not the parent-child relationship implied by the dialect assumption. Similarly, Bahasa Manggarai, which has been the primary source of loanwords into Wana Modo for generations, is a separate language; the borrowing direction flows predominantly from Manggarai into Komodo, not the reverse.
In terms of phonology, Wana Modo has a notably large consonant inventory. Contemporary fieldwork documented 31 consonants, including eight prenasalized stops, two implosive consonants — /ɓ/ (bilabial) and /ɗ/ (alveolar) — a dental plosive /d̪/, and a labio-dental approximant /ʋ/ not found in neighbouring languages. Loan phonemes — the palatal approximant /j/ and the labio-dental fricative /f/ — reflect centuries of contact with Manggarai, Bima, Bajo, and Indonesian. The vowel system comprises six oral vowels, including the mid-central /ə/, and five nasal vowels. Syllable structure tends toward open syllables; word-final positions permit only /h/ and the glottal stop /ʔ/. Stress falls predominantly on the penultimate syllable, a pattern widespread across Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia, though it shifts predictably in compound and multi-word constructions. Morphophonological processes are limited, with deletion and assimilation found primarily in compounding.
Speakers, Vitality, and Language Shift
Precise current speaker counts for Wana Modo are not publicly available, and any figure requires qualification. Ethnologue's entry (c. 2000 survey data) cited approximately 700 speakers. That figure was already modest; the intervening decades have seen no reversal in the pressures on the language, and the active speaker pool is generally considered by researchers to have contracted further. The language is known to be spoken on Komodo Island and in smaller numbers on Rinca Island and parts of western mainland Flores, but the primary community is Komodo-based.
Ethnologue's 2025 edition assigns the language EGIDS level 6b (Threatened). At this level, a language is still used for face-to-face communication across generations — adults speak it — but intergenerational transmission is unstable: not all children are acquiring the language as an active first language, and without intervention, the trajectory leads toward EGIDS 7 (Shifting) and ultimately toward silence. Glottolog's Agglomerated Endangerment Status (AES), drawn from multiple databases including the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, reflects the same assessment.
The mechanisms of displacement are structural. Bahasa Indonesia is the medium of formal education from the earliest grades, of all government functions, and of interaction with the growing population of visitors and non-Komodo residents brought by tourism. Bahasa Manggarai, spoken by a community of roughly 730,000 people across Flores (BPS 2009), serves as the dominant regional lingua franca in West Manggarai Regency — the administrative unit that includes Komodo Island. In this multilingual environment, many children of the island hear Wana Modo from grandparents and older adults but do not acquire productive fluency. The result is a generation of passive semi-speakers: individuals who recognise phrases and understand conversation but who do not speak freely and are unlikely to raise their own children in the language.
The situation is not one of sudden crisis but of gradual, accelerating attrition that began well before the formal establishment of Komodo National Park in 1980. Verheijen, during his fieldwork in the late 1970s and early 1980s, already found the language under severe pressure: outside the island's indigenous community, only a small handful of individuals could understand it. The subsequent transformation of the island into a major international tourism destination — attracting tens of thousands of visitors annually — intensified the economic incentive to use Indonesian and English, further marginalising a language with no written tradition and no institutional support.
On the EGIDS Scale
EGIDS 6b (Threatened) does not mean a language is imminently extinct. It signals that transmission is unstable and that deliberate intervention — documentation, community-driven education, school inclusion, oral archive programmes — is needed to prevent further decline. The gap between EGIDS 6b and full extinction can span a generation or two, but those decades are the window within which effective action is still possible.
Key Documentation: Verheijen (1987) and Later Work
The foundational document for any study of Wana Modo is J.A.J. Verheijen's 1987 monograph, Pulau Komodo: Tanah, Rakyat, dan Bahasanya ("Komodo Island: Land, People, and Its Language"), published by Balai Pustaka in Jakarta and now held in the repository of Indonesia's Ministry of Education and Culture. Verheijen (1911–1993) was a Dutch missionary-linguist of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) who spent the majority of his career across the Lesser Sunda Islands, beginning in the mid-1930s. He became aware of the particular vulnerability of the Komodo community in the late 1970s, conducting sustained fieldwork on the island between approximately 1977 and 1985.
The monograph's structure mirrors its subtitle: it opens with the island's geography and ecology, moves through the history, social organisation, and oral literature of the Ata Modo, and concludes with the linguistic documentation proper. The linguistic sections cover the phonemic inventory, morphology, and core syntax of Wana Modo, followed by the volume's most enduring contribution: tri-directional word lists — Komodo-Indonesian-English, Indonesian-Komodo, and English-Komodo — spanning hundreds of lexical entries and representing the most detailed published lexical record of the language. The folk-story collection (nunduk) gathered in pages 68–91 preserves oral narratives including the founding legend of Komodo Village, providing primary-source material for both linguistic and ethnographic analysis.
Verheijen's work was complemented the same year by a companion Indonesian-language study: Troeboes and colleagues' Morfologi dan sintaksis bahasa Komodo (Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 1987), which approached the language's morphological and syntactic structures from a descriptive Indonesian linguistics perspective and provided an additional layer of documentation from within Indonesia's own academic tradition.
More recent fieldwork includes a phonological sketch published in Jurnal Arbitrer (Universitas Andalas), based on approximately thirty days of original fieldwork with native speakers using elicited word lists and naturalistic speech recordings. That study's documentation of 31 consonants and a complex vowel system with oral-nasal contrasts represents the most technically detailed published account of the sound system to date. The Glottolog 5.x bibliography for komo1261 also cites Grimes and Edwards (2025) for subclassification, indicating ongoing scholarly engagement with the language's position in the regional family tree.
Despite these contributions, researchers consistently describe the language as "under-documented and understudied" — a sober verdict given that Verheijen's own work was itself driven by a sense of urgency. Audio archives, elicitation of naturalistic text across registers, and comprehensive grammatical description all remain incomplete relative to the depth needed for meaningful revitalization.
Words and Terms: The Language in Use
Wana Modo vocabulary, documented primarily by Dutch missionary-linguist Father Jilis Verheijen in the 1970s–1980s, reflects the language's Austronesian structure with substantial lexical borrowing from Manggarai, Malay, and colonial Dutch. Key documented terms include wana (language or speech, as in the language's own name), ata (person or people, as in Ata Modo), and ora or wia for the Komodo dragon.
A selection of documented Wana Modo vocabulary illuminates the language's character and its layered relationships with neighbouring languages. The following terms come from attested sources.
| Wana Modo term | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| wana | language / speech | Appears in the language's own endonym: Wana Modo |
| ata | people / person | Endonym for the community: Ata Modo; also used in the general sense "human being" |
| tana | land / earth / territory | Island endonym: Tana Modo; cognate with widespread Austronesian forms across the archipelago |
| sebae | twins / siblings | The indigenous Komodo-language name for the Komodo dragon; encodes the twin-cosmology of the Ata Modo |
| ora | Komodo dragon (general use) | A borrowing from western Manggarai; widely used on Komodo Island and across Flores; not the indigenous Komodo-language term |
| mbuta | traditional food from Gebang palm seed flour | Documented as a traditional staple of the Ata Modo; culturally significant in the aru gele ritual |
The coexistence of sebae and ora for the same animal is telling. Sebae is the indigenous term, saturated with cosmological significance: it locates the Komodo dragon within the family of humanity, as a twin sibling rather than a predator. Ora — a Manggarai borrowing — is more widely understood across western Flores and dominates in contemporary tourism, wildlife management, and broader public discourse. The borrowing direction illustrates a consistent pattern in the language's vocabulary: Manggarai vocabulary entered Wana Modo heavily in domains of agriculture, forest use, and everyday domestic life, while Bajo (the language of the sea-nomad communities that traded extensively in the archipelago) contributed terms for maritime activity, and Bima lent vocabulary related to political authority and trade goods. The core vocabulary — pronouns, body parts, fundamental verbs — retains a distinctively Komodo character that resists ready classification with any single neighbour.
The reduplication pattern also carries linguistic significance. Documented examples such as hipi-hapek ("going here and there") illustrate a partial reduplication strategy involving addition or removal of final phonemes — a morphological process that is characteristic of Wana Modo and adds to the evidence for its independent grammatical identity.
Oral Folklore, the Putri Naga Legend, and Language as Cultural Memory
The most celebrated body of oral tradition preserved in Wana Modo is the cluster of stories surrounding the origin of the Komodo dragon and the relationship between the Ata Modo and the animals they call sebae. The version most widely documented from Komodo Island tells of a woman — in some tellings called Putri Naga (the Dragon Princess), in others simply a village woman named for her clan — who gives birth to twins: one a human child, typically named Gerong, and the other an egg from which hatches a large lizard referred to as Ora (using the Manggarai term) or described simply through the indigenous category sebae. The two grow up side by side. As the lizard matures and her appetites become incompatible with village life, she is released to the forest — but the bond is never severed. The story anchors two social norms of great practical consequence: the prohibition on harming Komodo dragons, and the belief that the Ata Modo can communicate with the animals in ways that outsiders cannot.
The Komodo-language term sebae — "twins" — is the linguistic distillation of this entire cosmological framework. A single word encodes centuries of coexistence, a moral prohibition, and a claim to unique custodianship of the island and its wildlife. It is precisely this kind of semantic density that linguists mean when they say a language cannot be translated without loss: sebae in Wana Modo carries registers of meaning that the Indonesian word kembar (twins) and the English word "sibling" simply do not contain.
The annual aru gele ritual — in which Gebang palm fruit (gebang) is pounded in a communal ceremony recalling the shared ancestral bond — has historically been performed in Wana Modo. Ritual registers of a language tend to be the last to yield to language shift, but they also become progressively more opaque to younger generations who lack fluency, creating a situation where the ceremony survives in form while the linguistic medium through which its meaning is transmitted erodes.
Verheijen's 1987 collection of nunduk (folk narratives) preserves a number of these oral texts in written form, providing a baseline for researchers and community members seeking to reconstruct or revitalise oral tradition. But written transcription captures only the verbal text, not the prosody, the performance context, or the embodied knowledge of a skilled narrator — all of which are part of what a living oral tradition transmits.
For the full narrative of the origin legend and its variants, see Ora and the Twin Myth. For the broader social and demographic context of the community that speaks this language, see Ata Modo and Komodo Village. For the linguistic world of the closely related but distinct Manggarai community of western Flores, see Manggarai People.
Urgency of Preservation
Wana Modo, the indigenous language of the Ata Modo people of Komodo Island, is a critically endangered Austronesian language with fewer than a few hundred remaining speakers. Its urgency rests on three grounds: irreversibility (once the final fluent speakers pass without comprehensive documentation, the language's unique knowledge encoding is permanently lost), the thinness of existing records, and the accelerating displacement of the Ata Modo community by ecotourism development.
The case for urgent action on Wana Modo rests on three distinct but intertwined grounds.
The first is irreversibility. When a language ceases to be transmitted across generations and the last fluent speakers pass away without a comprehensive record having been made, the specific configuration of knowledge encoded in that language is gone permanently. Verheijen's word lists, indispensable as they are, capture lexical items but not the full grammar, not the prosodic patterns of connected speech, not the pragmatic conventions that govern how speakers use the language in context, and not the complete oral literature. Reconstruction from fragments is possible in linguistics, but it produces a historical artifact — not a living language capable of being acquired and used by new speakers.
The second ground is cultural identity. For the descendants of the Ata Modo who continue to live on Komodo Island — many of whom now have mixed ancestry with Manggarai, Bima, Bajo, and Bugis families settled on the island over generations — Wana Modo is not merely a communication tool but the primary marker of a distinct identity that predates the national park, predates Indonesian independence, and predates any of the currently dominant regional languages. As the community navigates complex tensions between conservation management and indigenous land rights (a conflict documented in recent scholarship on the national park's governance), the presence or absence of a living language bears directly on the community's capacity to articulate its own claims in its own terms.
The third is scientific value. The Ata Modo's long coexistence with Varanus komodoensis — Verheijen postulated continuous human occupation spanning at least two millennia — has generated detailed observational knowledge of dragon behaviour, seasonal movement patterns, habitat preferences, and interspecies dynamics. Much of this knowledge exists only in Wana Modo vocabulary and oral narrative, and has not been systematically captured in formal biological literature. Collaboration between linguists, oral historians, and conservation biologists could recover this knowledge, but only while fluent speakers survive.
Indonesia's Balai Bahasa regional language agencies provide an institutional framework for local-language documentation, and provincial authorities in East Nusa Tenggara have shown increasing awareness of the region's linguistic diversity. International programmes such as the Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) and the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) represent additional pathways for funding and archiving fieldwork. As of 2026, these avenues remain insufficiently engaged for Wana Modo relative to the scale of the challenge.
Myths vs Facts
| Myth | Fact |
|---|---|
| The Komodo language is just a dialect of Bimanese or Manggarai. | Verheijen (1987) demonstrated conclusively that Wana Modo is an independent language — not mutually intelligible with either Bahasa Bima or Bahasa Manggarai — with its own phonology, grammar, and core vocabulary. |
| "Ora" is the authentic Komodo-language word for the Komodo dragon. | Ora is a Manggarai loanword widely used on Komodo Island. The indigenous Komodo-language term is sebae, meaning "twins," which encodes the community's twin-cosmology. Both terms circulate in daily life but carry different cultural registers. |
| The language is already extinct. | Ethnologue (2025) classifies Wana Modo as EGIDS 6b (Threatened) — still spoken by adults across generations but with unstable intergenerational transmission. It is not extinct, though it faces serious pressure. |
| The Bima-Sumba subgroup is a fully proven genealogical unit. | The grouping is widely used in Ethnologue and Glottolog but has not been demonstrated through the shared-innovation method standard in historical linguistics. It functions as a useful working label, not a confirmed clade. |
| Only elderly islanders have any awareness of the language. | Many younger people on Komodo Island have passive familiarity with Wana Modo from extended family contact, but active productive fluency is concentrated among older adults. A range of semi-speakers and heritage speakers exists between the two extremes. |
| Tourism has no effect on language vitality. | Tourism growth on Komodo Island has accelerated the shift toward Indonesian and, to a lesser extent, English, by creating strong economic incentives to communicate in languages understood by visitors, further marginalising Wana Modo in everyday economic contexts. |
Practical Takeaways
- Wana Modo is a fully independent Austronesian language with ISO 639-3 code kvh and Glottocode komo1261 — not a dialect of Bimanese or Manggarai, but a complete linguistic system with documented grammar, phonology, and lexicon.
- Its classification within Bima-Sumba is a working label, not a definitively proven genealogical clade; its broader membership of Austronesian → Malayo-Polynesian → Central Malayo-Polynesian is not in dispute.
- Verheijen's 1987 monograph (Pulau Komodo: Tanah, Rakyat, dan Bahasanya, Balai Pustaka, Jakarta) remains the indispensable primary source, available through the Indonesian Ministry of Education's institutional repository.
- Approximately 700 speakers were reported c. 2000 (Ethnologue); the current active community is likely smaller, concentrated in older adults, and Ethnologue rates the language EGIDS 6b (Threatened) as of 2025.
- Sebae (twins) is the indigenous Komodo word for the Komodo dragon, encoding the cosmological relationship between the Ata Modo and the animals in a single term; ora is a Manggarai loanword used alongside it.
- Documentation is urgently incomplete: audio archives, naturalistic text corpora, and full grammatical description remain priority needs for researchers and community members working on preservation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ISO 639-3 code for the Komodo language?
The ISO 639-3 code is kvh. The Glottocode assigned by Glottolog is komo1261. Both codes are used in international linguistic databases to identify and catalogue resources for Wana Modo — the Ata Modo name for their language.
Is the Komodo language the same as the Bima language?
No. Wana Modo and Bahasa Bima (Nggahi Mbojo) are distinct, non-mutually-intelligible languages. They share membership of the broader Central Malayo-Polynesian grouping, and centuries of contact under the Bima Sultanate left Bima loanwords in Wana Modo, particularly in vocabulary related to political authority and trade. But the two languages differ structurally in ways that make ordinary comprehension impossible across the language boundary without prior learning. Verheijen's 1987 documentation was partly driven by correcting this colonial-era misidentification.
How many people speak the Komodo language today?
Ethnologue cited approximately 700 speakers based on survey data from around the year 2000. Precise updated figures are not publicly available. The active speaker community is generally believed to have contracted since then, with fluency concentrated among older adults. Ethnologue's most recent classification (2025) places the language at EGIDS 6b (Threatened), indicating that intergenerational transmission is unstable.
What does "ora" mean, and is it actually a Komodo-language word?
Ora is the widely used local name for the Komodo dragon across Komodo Island and much of western and central Flores — the word visitors most often encounter. However, it is not originally from Wana Modo: it is a borrowing from Bahasa Manggarai, in which it referred to monitor lizards generally. The indigenous Komodo-language term for the dragon is sebae, meaning "twins," which reflects the cosmological belief that humans and Komodo dragons share a common ancestral mother. Both words are in circulation on the island; they carry very different cultural weight.
What is the Putri Naga legend, and how does it connect to the language?
The Putri Naga legend, told in several versions across Komodo and Flores, describes a woman who gives birth to twin offspring — one human, one Komodo dragon. The twins grow up as siblings, and the story explains why the Ata Modo regard the animals with respect rather than fear. In Wana Modo, the very word for the Komodo dragon, sebae, embeds this twin cosmology. Oral transmission of the legend has historically been performed in the language itself, meaning that the story's full cultural depth is accessible only through the language. For the full narrative, see Ora and the Twin Myth.
Who documented the Komodo language, and when?
The foundational documentation was carried out by J.A.J. Verheijen, a Dutch missionary-linguist of the SVD order, during fieldwork conducted between approximately 1977 and 1985. His monograph Pulau Komodo: Tanah, Rakyat, dan Bahasanya was published in 1987 by Balai Pustaka, Jakarta. Indonesian linguists (Troeboes et al.) produced a companion study on morphology and syntax the same year. More recent phonological fieldwork has been published in Jurnal Arbitrer (Universitas Andalas), though the language remains significantly under-documented.
Is the Komodo language taught in schools?
As of available reports, Wana Modo is not known to be formally taught in any school on Komodo Island. Education follows the national Indonesian curriculum conducted in Bahasa Indonesia. This structural absence from formal education is a primary driver of the weakening of intergenerational transmission: children who do not acquire the language at home have no institutional pathway through which to learn it.
What is the relationship between the Komodo language and Manggarai?
Wana Modo and Bahasa Manggarai are distinct languages within the same broad family; they are not mutually intelligible and are classified separately in Ethnologue and Glottolog. Manggarai has, however, been the single largest source of loanwords into Wana Modo, particularly in agricultural, forest, and domestic vocabulary. The word ora (Komodo dragon) is itself a Manggarai loan. Today, Bahasa Manggarai is — alongside Bahasa Indonesia — one of the two languages actively displacing Wana Modo in daily life on the island. For the Manggarai language and people of western Flores, see Manggarai People.
Sources & Further Reading
- Verheijen, J.A.J. (1987). Pulau Komodo: Tanah, Rakyat, dan Bahasanya. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka. [Foundational ethnolinguistic survey; fieldwork c. 1977–1985; Komodo–Indonesian–English word lists; folk-story collection.] Available: repositori.kemendikdasmen.go.id/1845/
- Troeboes, Maryanto, S., Gampar, A., Porat, A., & Hana, A. (1987). Morfologi dan sintaksis bahasa Komodo. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa. [Descriptive morphological and syntactic analysis.]
- Eberhard, David M., Simons, Gary F., & Fennig, Charles D. (eds.) (2025). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 28th ed. SIL International. Language entry: Komodo (kvh). EGIDS 6b — Threatened. ethnologue.com/language/kvh
- Hammarström, H., et al. (2025). Glottolog 5.3. Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. Glottocode: komo1261. glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/komo1261
- Grimes, Charles E. & Edwards, Owen (2025). Subclassification notes cited in Glottolog 5.x entry for komo1261, pp. 110–112.
- [Author, Universitas Andalas] (published c. 2022–2024). "A Phonological Sketch of Modo: An Endangered Language in Eastern Indonesia." Jurnal Arbitrer, Universitas Andalas. arbitrer.fib.unand.ac.id. [Documents 31 consonants, 6 oral vowels, 5 nasal vowels; based on 30-day fieldwork.]
- Wikipedia contributors. "Komodo language." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. [Summary of ISO code, speaker count c. 2000, classification, and phonological notes.] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_language
- Wikipedia contributors. "Komodo people." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. [Community ethnonym, language use, and the sebae terminology.] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_people
- Floresa.co (2022). "Karya Lama Verheijen yang Kian Relevan di Tanah Komodo." floresa.co. [Indonesian-language discussion of Verheijen's continuing relevance.]
- BPS (Central Agency on Statistics, Indonesia) (2009). East Nusa Tenggara language statistics. [Manggarai speaker figure of 730,000+ cited in Wikipedia "Manggarai language."]