Bidayuh Bau is a significant dialect spoken by over 50,000 people in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, North-Western Borneo, clustered around Bau near Kuching.
There are three major sub-dialects of the language with substantial variations between them: Jagoi, Serombu, and Singgai, each approximately referring to the zone around an ancestral peak. With regard to these dialects, it is usual to refer to the language as, for example, Bidayuh Jagoi (BiJagoi or Bau-Jagoi), Biro’ih (Serombu) or Bidayuh Singgai (BiSinggai). It is also possible to further identify the Jagoi variety as Jagoi, Bratak, and Krokong.
Lists of mainly Bidayuh Bau-Jagoi terms are given below. The orthography employed here may differ from other dictionaries accessible today to ensure consistency of pronunciation. Any terms spelled with a double vowel, such as baat (heavy), are the sound of a long vowel /ba:t/. This distinctive attribute does not account for any of the Bidayuh dictionaries.
If there is an apostrophe in the centre of the expression, for example, ba’at (a border) or at the end of a sentence, a glottal plosive is, for example, bau ‘(Bau town). The glottal plosive is an essential language sound that, when added to the terms above, many writers appear to neglect or wrongly substitute with either a ‘k’ or a ‘h’ would turn them into other words such as baat, bakat and bahat or bau, bauk and bauh. As in daya ‘, the term Dayak ends with a glottal plosive, and there is no Bidayuh word pronounced as Dayak.
They are also spoken with an unreleased voiceless articulation with certain words ending with the nasals m, n, ng, and seen in the chart as p, t and k respectively to distinguish from the normal nasal sounds. Giyamp (a rapid), isint (flesh), and asink are some examples (urine). Typically, omitting the final unreleased sounds indicates that the speaker is a non-native language person.
Go through the lists to see how any words from Bidayuh can be pronounced.