Tonsawang is spoken in the village of Tombatu and more than a dozen surrounding villages in the southern part of the Minahasan area. Even into the 1960s this area was relatively isolated and Tonsawang could still be described as “almost completely surrounded by uninhabited mountainous land” (Sneddon 1970:17). In addition, Tonsawang have settled in a number of villages outside of the homeland area (see the enumeration in Merrifield 1991:83).
Before Tonsawang was well known, it was at one time classified as a dialect of Tontemboan (Esser 1938). In reality Tonsawang is the most lexically and even morphologically divergent of the five Minahasan languages, suggesting a long period of separate development (Sneddon 1970, 1978).
Merrifield and Salea tentatively propose to divide Tonsawang into northern and southern dialect areas. However of their five dialectal differences, each divides the Tonsawang language area along different lines (Merrifield and Salea 1996:24–26), thus somewhat undercutting the basis of their proposal.
Tonsawang is the smallest of the five Minahasan languages. Sneddon (1983) reported 20,000 speakers of Tonsawang—an estimate which may date to the author’s work in Minahasa in the early 1970s. More recently, the 2000 Indonesian census reports 31,000 ethnic Tonsawang in North Sulawesi (Suryadinata, Arifin and Ananta 2003:9). With the rapid decline in use of Tonsawang and the rise of a generation of semi-speakers (Hirabayashi 2003:128), an updated estimate of the speaker population is not available.
Esser, S. J. 1938. Talen. Map, scale 1:10,000,000. Atlas van Tropisch Nederland, by Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap in cooperation with the Topografischen Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië, sheet 9b. ’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff.
Hirabayashi, Teruo. 2003. Code selection of Bahasa Tonsawang in Minahasa, North Sulawesi. (Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim, A3-015.) Osaka: ELPR.
Merrifield, Judi. [1991.] Life in North Sulawesi. Unpublished typescript, vii, 107 pp.
Sneddon, J. N. 1970. The languages of Minahasa, North Celebes. Oceanic Linguistics 9:11–36.
Sneddon, J. N. 1978. Proto-Minahasan: Phonology, morphology and wordlist. (Pacific Linguistics, B‑54.) Canberra: Australian National University.
Sneddon, J. N. (compiler.) 1983. Northern Celebes (Sulawesi). Language atlas of the Pacific area, part 2: Japan area, Taiwan (Formosa), Philippines, mainland and insular South-east Asia (Pacific Linguistics, C‑67), edited by Stephen A. Wurm and Shirô Hattori, map 43. Canberra: Australian National University, Australian Academy of the Humanities and The Japan Academy.
Suryadinata, Leo; Evi Nurvidya Arifin, and Aris Ananta. 2003. Indonesia’s population: Ethnicity and religion in a changing political landscape. (Indonesia’s Population Series, 1.) Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.