Kéo language

Kéo
Nage-Keo
Native toIndonesia
RegionCentral Flores
EthnicityNage, Kéo
Native speakers
(100,000 cited 1993)
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
xxk  Keʼo
nxe  Nage
Glottolognage1238

Kéo or Nagé-Kéo is a Malayo-Polynesian dialect cluster spoken by the Kéo and Nage people (ʼata Kéo 'Kéo people') that reside in an area southeast of the Ebu Lobo volcano in the south-central part of Nusa Tenggara Timur Province on the island of Flores, eastern Indonesia, largely in the eponymous Nagekeo Regency.

Kéo belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Bima-Lembata subgroups of the Austronesian language family and there are approximately 40,000 speakers.

Kéo is sometimes referred to as Nage-Kéo, Nage being the name of a neighbouring ethnic group that is generally considered culturally distinct from Kéo; however, whether or not the two languages are separate entities is ambivalent.

Uncommon to Austronesian languages, Kéo is a highly isolating language that lacks inflectional morphology or clear morphological derivation. Instead it relies more heavily on lexical and syntactic grammatical processes.