Rungus

About Rungus

Rungus is a variety of Momogun, an Austronesian language spoken in Sabah, Malaysia. It currently has around 60,000 speakers, including 10,000 monolinguals. The language is threatened and has extremely low digital support.

• Ethnologue page for Rungus
  • Basic linguistic information
• Glottolog page for Rungus
  • Basic linguistic information and categorization
• (Very sparse) Wikipedia page for Momogun, Rungus's autonym
  • Not very helpful. Perhaps we will be able to populate it in the future :)
• Compilation of various resources
  • OLAC resources about Rungus: wordlists, language data, etc.

Existing Resources

Computational Resources

• Course Github Repository [1]
  • Currently holds several files of Rungus words, phrases, and sentences

Dictionaries/Phrasebooks/Glossaries

• Appell, G. N., & Appell, L. W. R. (1961). A provisional field dictionary of the Rungus Dusun language of North Borneo.
  • Field dictionary made for doing fieldwork with the Rungus people. Requested through ILL (Edit: arrived).
• SIL Global. (2025). Rungus Dictionary. Webonary.org. URL
  • Online dictionary that translates between Rungus, Malay, and English. Has full Rungus phrases translated from Rungus to English as well. The entire site can also be translated into Rungus, which could be really nice.
  • Webonary's terms of service seem to allow us to use its data for our purposes. We are allowed to download any content accessible on the website.
• Sokuroh, J.K. (2013). Pu'un do Boros Momogun Rungus Rootwords (Momogun Rungus - English)
  • Another Rungus to English dictionary that appears to specify rootwords, which may be helpful. Requested through ILL.

Grammatical Descriptions

Appears to be primarily inflectional. Tenses and other words are formed with affixation, whether that be prefixes, infixes, or suffixes. Since Austronesian languages tend to be further on the agglutinative side of things, it's very possible that there is some agglutination happening as well.

• Forschner, T. A. (1994). Hoturan Di Boros Momogun (Rungus) = Outline of a Momogun Grammar (Rungus Dialect). Kudat. PDF
  • The main grammar of Rungus we have been able to find. Seems to be pretty comprehensive.

Scientific Works

• King, J. K. (1984). The Rungus Language. In J. K. King & J. W. King (Eds.), Languages of Sabah: A Survey Report, pp.283-296. The Australian National University. PDF
  • This is a survey of the dialects of Rungus, testing dialect intelligibility. Not sure if this will be helpful, but it's here for now.
• Al-Khaza'leh, B. A. (2023). Status of Rungus Language as an Indigenous Language Spoken by Rungus Ethnic Group in Eastern Malaysia. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 14(3), pp. 656-664. URL.
  • This is essentially an ethnographic status check on how the Rungus language is doing endangerment-wise. The language is endangered and literacy rates are dropping.

Corpora

• Sulukan, Minie (translator). (2020). SUMODIA suma'ap #COVID-19. University Malaysia Sabah. URL
  • Translation of COVID resources. The page itself is in Malay, but at the bottom there are versions of each poster translated into Rungus.
• Bongkol, Parasin. (2003). Usul do Minamangun om Koposizon do Momogun: om vokon po.
  • This is a selection of texts in Rungus on many different topics, such as worldview, poetry, and traditional law.
• It Avanus o Bahazan: om ongo surat vokon
  • Seems to be a book in Rungus. Requested through ILL (Edit: arrived)

Developed Resources

Keyboard

• Wiki keyboard page