Nias language
| Nias | |
|---|---|
| Li Niha | |
| Native to | Indonesia |
| Region | Nias and Batu Islands, North Sumatra |
|
Native speakers
|
770,000 (2000 census) |
|
Austronesian
|
|
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | nias1242 |
The Nias language is an Austronesian language spoken on Nias Island and the Batu Islands off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. It is known as Li Niha by its native speakers. It belongs to the Northwest Sumatran subgroup which also includes Mentawai and the Batak languages. It had about 770,000 speakers in 2000. There are three main dialects: northern, central and southern.
The following dialects are distinguished in Ethnologue.
The southern dialect of Nias has the following phonemes:
The status of initial [ʔ] is not determined; there are no phonetic vowel-initial words in Nias. Northern Nias has /ŋ/ but not /c/; in addition, /z/ is pronounced [z].
Nias has an ergative–absolutive alignment. Unusually, it appears to be the absolutive (mutated) case which is marked, against the near-universal tendency to mark the ergative.
There are no adjectives in Nias, with that function taken by verbs.
Nias shows consonant mutation at the beginning of nouns and some other classes of words to show grammatical case. Several consonants are subject to mutation as shown in the table below. Where a word begins in a vowel, either n or g is added before the vowel; the choice of n or g is lexically conditioned. (For example, öri ~ nöri is 'village federation', öri ~ göri is 'bracelet'.)
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Wikipedia