Native to Indonesia ISO 639-2 nia Glottolog nias1242 | Native speakers 770,000 (2000 census) ISO 639-3 nia Writing system Latin script | |
Region Nias and Batu Islands, North Sumatra Language family Austronesian languages, Malayo-Sumbawan languages | ||
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.
Contents
Dialects
The following dialects are distinguished in Ethnologue.
Phonology
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].
Grammar
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'.)
Other consonants do not change.
The unmutated form is used in citation. The mutated form only occurs on the first noun in a noun phrase (that is, not after a conjunction like 'and'). It is used for:
Besides being the citation form, the unmutated form is used for: