Nias language

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 Sumatra–Barrier Islands 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. It is an open-syllable language, which means there are no syllable-final consonants.

Nias is typically considered to have three dialects.

Cognate percentage among the dialects of Nias is about 80%.

The northern variant is considered the prestige dialect. The only complete Bible translation is written in the northern dialect and is used by speakers of all dialects.

Nias has the following phonemes (sounds only found in the northern dialect are given in green, southern-only sounds are in red):

Phonetic descriptions of the sounds traditionally written as ⟨mb⟩ and ⟨ndr⟩ greatly vary. Sundermann (1913) and Halawa et al. (1983) describe them as prenasalized stop [ᵐb] and prenasalized trilled stop [ⁿdʳ] for the northern dialect, while Brown (2005) records them as trill [ʙ] and trilled stop [dʳ] for the southern dialect. In an acoustic study of Nias dialects from three locations, Yoder (2010) shows a complex pattern of four phonetic realizations of ⟨mb⟩ and ⟨ndr⟩: plain stop, prenasalized stop, stop with trilled release, stop with fricated release.

The status of initial [ʔ] is not determined; there are no phonetic vowel-initial words in Nias.

The contrast between [v] and [ʋ] (both written ⟨w⟩ in common spelling) is only observed in the southern dialect. Here, the fricative [v] only occurs in initial position in the mutated form (see §Noun case marking (mutation)) of nouns beginning with f, e.g. fakhe ~ wakhe [vaxe]. The approximant [ʋ] can appear in initial and medial position, and is in free variation with [v] for many speakers of the southern dialect. For the northern dialect, only fricative approximant [ʋ] is reported, corresponding to both sounds of southern Nias. The semivowel [w] is a distinct phoneme and is written ⟨ŵ⟩ in common spelling.