Nasal () is an

Austronesian language The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...

of southwestern

Sumatra Sumatra () is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the list of islands by area, sixth-largest island in the world at 482,286.55 km2 (182,812 mi. ...

Classification

Anderbeck & Aprilani (2013) consider Nasal to be an isolate within the

Malayo-Polynesian The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...

branch. Smith (2017), though, includes the language in the "Sumatran" subgroup, alongside other Batak–Barrier Islands languages. Billings & McDonnell (2022) presents further evidence for Nasal as a Sumatran language.Billings, Blaine; McDonnell, Bradley. 2022.
Subgrouping Malayo-Polynesian languages of Sumatra and the Barrier Islands
'. Presentation given at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 31),

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa The University of Hawaii at Mānoa is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Hawaiʻi system and houses the main offic ...

, May 18–20, 2022.
slides

Background

Nasal is spoken in the Nasal River area of Kaur Regency,

Bengkulu Bengkulu (), historically known as Bencoolen, is a province of Indonesia. It is located on the southwest coast of Sumatra. It was formed on 18 November 1968 by separating out the area of the historic Bencoolen Residency from the province of ...

Province,

, in the villages of Tanjung Betuah, Gedung Menung (both in Muara Nasal district), and Tanjung Baru (in Maje district). There are many loanwords from

Lampung Lampung, officially the Province of Lampung (; ), is a province of Indonesia. It is located on the southern tip of the island of Sumatra. It has a short border with the province of Bengkulu to the northwest, and a longer border with the provi ...

. Languages spoken near the Nasal area include the Krui dialect of Lampung and the Malayic languages

Kaur Kaur ( urmukhi/ hahmukhi ), sometimes spelled as Kour, is a surname or a part of a personal name primarily used by the Sikhism, Sikh and some Hindu women of the Punjab region. It is also sometimes translated as 'lioness', not because ...

, Serawai and Semenda (Anderbeck & Aprilani 2013:3). The language has been given a tentative EGIDS rating of 6a (Vigorous), though this is based on early sociolinguistic surveying, and language vitality has yet to be fully assessed.

References

*Anderbeck, Karl; Aprilani, Herdian. 2013.
The Improbable Language: Survey Report on the Nasal Language of Bengkulu, Sumatra
'. SIL Electronic Survey Report. SIL International.

External links

Sumatran languages Malayo-Polynesian languages Languages of Indonesia {{austronesian-lang-stub