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.

Dictionaries/Phrasebooks/Glossaries

• Appell, G. N., & Appell, L. W. R. (1961). A provisional field dictionary of the Rungus Dusun language of North Borneo.
• SIL Global. (2025). Rungus Dictionary. Webonary.org. [1]
• Sokuroh, J.K. (2013). Pu'un do Boros Momogun Rungus Rootwords (Momogun Rungus - English)

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. [2]

Scientific Works

• King, Julie K. "The Rungus Language." Languages of Sabah: A Survey Report, 1997, pp.283-296. [3]
  • This is a survey of the dialects of Rungus, testing dialect intelligibility. I'm not sure if this will be helpful, but I'll drop it here for now.

Corpora

• Sulukan, Minie (translator). (2020). SUMODIA suma'ap #COVID-19. University Malaysia Sabah. [4]
• 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.