The Nature and Underlying Representations of Long Vowels and Diphthongs in Fataluku

Fataluku is an underdocumented Papuan language spoken by approximately 37,000 individuals in East Timor, a nation in island Southeast Asia. After providing some background information on the phonology of Fataluku, this paper discusses the presence and phonological representations of surface long vowels and diphthongs. The evidence shows that vowel length is indeed contrastive, but both long vowels and diphthongs are represented underlyingly as sequences of vowels rather than as true unit phonemes.