Key facts
- Native to
- Indonesia
- Region
- Nias and Batu Islands , North Sumatra
- Ethnicity
- Nias people
- Native speakers
- (770,000 cited 2000 census)
- Language family
- Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Northwest Sumatra–Barrier Islands Northern Barrier Islands Nias–Sikule Nias
- Writing system
- Latin
- Iso 639 2
- nia
- Iso 639 3
- nia
- Glottolog
- nias1242
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- modern language
- Subclass of
- Northwest Sumatra–Barrier Islands
- Named after
- Nias
- Country
- Indonesia
Show 8 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:Nias language
- Wikimedia language code
- nia
- writing system
- Latin script
- indigenous to
- North Sumatra
- native label
- bahasa Batu
- number of speakers, writers, or signers
- 825768
- Wikimedia Incubator URL
- incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wq/nia
Sources (7)
via Wikidata · CC0
~13 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A video of spoken Nias
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.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Nias” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.