• Ingatan Gulö

  Author

Spoken mostly in Nias Island located in the west part of Indonesia, Nias or Li Niha is a language which needs linguistic elaboration. It has characteristics that make it a unique language among those spoken in Indonesia, and to some extent, also has a few unusual features compared to the world languages. Its uniqueness is not limited to having only open syllables but also seen in other phonological issues, its orthography, morphology and syntax. This is an analytical-qualitative research done carefully by the writer as a native speaker of the language. In writing system, Nias uses umlaut over the letter o, circumflex over the letter w, and apostrophe between certain syllables. Phonologically, it has voiced bilabial trill, voiced bilabial fricative, voiced alveolar plosive trill, voiceless velar fricative and voiced dental fricative sounds. Morphologically, it is unique in its mutation system of nouns and peculiar type of ergativity. Syntactically, the language is also distinct in its structures of word order, predicates, and reflexivity.

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