Makassar (sometimes spelled Makasar or Macassar) is both a As with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition. ...language and a A writing system, also called a script, is used to visually record a language with symbols. ...writing system used by the people in Categories: Indonesia geography stubs | Provinces of Indonesia ...South Sulawesi island (Celebes) in The Republic of Indonesia, the worlds largest archipelago, is located between the Southeast Asian peninsula and Australia, between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. ...Indonesia.

The Makassar language is a member of the The Austronesian languages are a family of languages widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ...Austronesian language family.

Although Makassarese is now often written with the The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. ...Roman alphabet, it is still widely written in its own distinctive script, also called Lontara, which once was used also to write important documents in Buginese (locally Basa Ugi, elsewhere also Bahasa Bugis, Bugis, Bugi, De) is the language spoken by about four million people, mainly in the southern part of Celebes (Sulawesi), in Indonesia. ...Bugis and Mandar, two related language from Map of Sulawesi pictures by Julianto Halim Sulawesi (or Celebes) is a large Indonesian island. ...Sulawesi.

The Makassar symbols are written using mostly straight oblique lines and dots. In spite of its is quite distinctive appearance, it is derived from the ancient Brahmi refers to the pre_modern members of the Brahmic family of scripts, attested from the 5th century BC. The best known inscriptions in Brahmi are the rock_cut edicts of Ashoka, c. ...Brahmi scripts of The Republic of India is the second most populous country in the world, with a population of more than one billion, and is the seventh largest country by geographical area. ...India. Like other descendants of that script, each consonant has an inherent vowel "a", which is not marked. Other vowels can be indicated by adding one of five A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ...diacritics above, below, or on either side of each consonant.

External links

• Lontara and Makassar scripts (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/lontara.htm)
• Lontara Alphabet in Unicode (http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2633r.pdf)