Ngaju is an Austronesian

Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...

 language spoken along the Kapuas, Kahayan

Kahayan River

The Kahayan river, or Great Dyak, is the largest river in Central Kalimantan, a province of Indonesia in Kalimantan - the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. The provincial capital Palangkaraya lies on the river. The main inhabitants are Dyaks, who practice slash-and-burn rice cultivation and...

, Katingan, and Mentaya Rivers in Central Borneo, Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

. It is closely related to Bakumpai language. There are three dialects—Pulopetak, Ba'amang, and Mantangai.

Consonants

Ngaju has the following consonants.

		Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Coronal Coronal consonant Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Stops Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	Voiceless	p	t	c	k
	Voiced	b	d	ɟ	ɡ
Fricatives Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...			s			h
Nasals Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...		m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....			l
Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular....			r
Semivowel Semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:... s		w		j

Vowels

Ngaju has the following vowels. All vowels except ə can be long.

	front	central	back rounded
High	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Low		a

Vocabulary

Vocabulary comparison between Bakumpai, Ngaju, Indonesian and English languages.

Bakumpai Bakumpai language Bakumpai is an Austronesian language bellonging to West Barito languages. It is spoken by about 100 000 Bakumpai people living in the central Kalimantan, Indonesia....	Ngaju	Indonesian Indonesian language Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....	English English language English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
Jida	Dia	Tidak	No
Beken	Beken	Bukan	Not
Pai	Pai	Kaki	Foot / Leg
Kueh	Kueh	Mana	Which / Where
Si-kueh	Bara-kueh	Dari mana	Where from
Hituh	Hetuh	Sini	Here
Si-hituh	Intu-hetuh	Di sini	Here
Bara	Bara	Dari	From
Kejaw	Kejaw	Jauh	Far
Tukep / Parak	Tukep	Dekat	Near
Kuman	Kuman	Makan	Eat
Mihup	Mihop	Minum	Drink
Lebu	Lewu	Kampung	Village
Batatapas	Bapukan	Mencuci pakaian	To wash clothes