Bima language
Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia
Bima (endonym: Nggahi Mbojo [ᵑɡa.hi ᵐbo.d͡ʒo]), or Bimanese, is an Austronesian language spoken on the eastern half of Sumbawa Island, Indonesia by the Bimanese and Dompuan peoples (Bima-Dompu), which it shares with speakers of the Sumbawa language. Bima territory includes the Sanggar Peninsula, where the extinct Papuan language, Tambora, was once spoken. Bima is an exonym; the autochthonous name for the territory is Mbojo and the language is referred to as Nggahi Mbojo. There are over half a million Bima speakers. Neither the Bima nor the Sumbawa people have alphabets of their own for they use the alphabets of the Bugis and the Malay language indifferently.
Bimanese is also spoken in several areas of Sumbawa Regency, Lombok, and East Nusa Tenggara (primaly in Komodo island and eastern part of Flores). In Flores, Bima is spoken by people in the Reo, Pota, and East Manggarai regions.
Classification
Long thought to be closely related to the languages of Sumba Island to the southeast, this assumption has been refuted by Blust (2008), which makes Bima a primary branch within the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroup.
Distribution
The Bimanese language is mostly spoken in the eastern part of the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, including Bima Regency, Dompu Regency, and Bima City. It also spoken in the islands of Banta, Moyo, Sangeang, Komodo and Rinca.
The public source identifies “Bima language” as austronesian language spoken in Indonesia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bima, language and Austronesian.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2796873. Authority coordinates are -8.460, 118.727. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bima language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.