Onya Darat is a language spoken, with great dialectal variation, in the interior
of western Borneo. It is the southernmost member of Land Dayak, a branch
of the Austronesian language family. This article reports on the development
of a writing system for Onya Darat. In addition to five vowels and 19 simple
consonants, Onya Darat also exhibits three series of complex oral-nasal
segments: prenasalized oral stops, preoralized nasals, and postoralized nasals.
An analysis of the Onya Darat sound system reveals that of these three series
only postoralized nasals are distinctive and therefore need to be represented
in the writing system. The proposed orthography, developed with the aid of
native speakers, represents all and only the phonemes of Onya Darat without
resorting to diacritics or special characters.
