Kangean language
Kangean or Kangeanese (referred to as Besa Kangean or Ocaq Kangean by local people) is a language spoken by the Kangeanese, which is an ethnic group originating from Kangean Island in the Kangean Islands region, north of the Bali Sea. It is native to Kangean and the surrounding islands. Kangean lies to the north of Bali, the northwest of Lombok and the east of Madura. The Kangean language is partly mutually intelligible with standard Madurese.

Nomenclature
In local terminology, the Kangean language is known as Besa Kangean or Ocaq Kangean. The word "besa" itself can also be spelled as "basa" similar to the term Makassar language, which is absorbed from the Old Javanese word "bhāṣa", itself derived from Sanskrit. On the other hand, the word ocaq which can also be spelled as ocak is a native term of the Kangean island which coincides with the term in Old Javanese kacak which has the meaning of "conversation".

Classification
Genealogically, the Kangean language is a language in the Javanic (East Javanese) language family, but has a dominant influence from the South Sulawesi languages family, and is related to the Bali–Sasak–Sumbawa languages. The Kangean language spoken in the western region of the Kangean Islands (Western Kangean dialect) has similar characteristics to the Madurese language spoken on the island of Madura, the Osing language spoken on the eastern tip of the island of Java, and the Balinese language (especially at the krama register) spoken on the island of Bali; where all of these languages are heavily influenced by Old Javanese, while the Kangean language spoken in the central to eastern region (Eastern Kangean dialect) tends to carry the distinctive characteristics of South Sulawesi languages, especially from languages such as Makassar language (referred to as Mangkasaraq locally by the Kangean people), Mandar (referred to as Mander locally), as well as Bugis (referred to locally as Bajo).

Writing System
Examined from an ethnolinguistic point of view (so far) from the discovery of inscriptions in the Kangean Islands, the original Kangean language is not known or it can be concluded that so far it does not have its own traditional script. From time to time, the use of scripts from other languages was used to write Kangean-language literature, including the Carakan (Javanese), Lontaraq, Mangkasaraq, Pegon, and Latin scripts which are now very dominantly used.

Latin
The Kangean language is now generally written in the 26-letter Latin script, but the use of the letters X and Z is generally rare in everyday life except in names. In Dutch colonial times, the Latin script used in Kangean had diacritics like the Latin script for Old Javanese used to distinguish sounds in words; for example, the word tepaq (transl. har. "appropriate") used to be written as tĕppaq, but nowadays Kangean tends to be written without diacritics and has undergone spelling standardization following Javanese spelling but simpler (for example, the word bathik in Javanese would be spelled as batik in Kangean).

References

Languages of Indonesia
Madurese language