Sahu (Sa’u, Sahu’u, Sau) is a
North Halmahera
North Halmahera Regency ( id, Kabupaten Halmahera Utara) is a regency (on Halmahera Island) of North Maluku Province, Indonesia. It was declared a Regency on 31 May 2003. The capital town of the regency lies at the port of Tobelo. The Regency, whi ...
language. Use is vigorous; dialects are Pa’disua (Palisua), Tala’i,
Waioli, and
Gamkonora. A fifth dialect, Ibu, used to be spoken near the mouth of the Ibu River.
Sahu has many
Ternate
Ternate is a city in the Indonesian province of North Maluku and an island in the Maluku Islands. It was the ''de facto'' provincial capital of North Maluku before Sofifi on the nearby coast of Halmahera became the capital in 2010. It is off the we ...
loanwords, a historical legacy of the dominance of the
Ternate Sultanate
The Sultanate of Ternate (Jawi alphabet: كسلطانن ترنتاي), previously also known as the Kingdom of Gapi is one of the oldest Muslim kingdoms in Indonesia besides Tidore, Jailolo, and Bacan. The Ternate kingdom was established by M ...
in the
Moluccas
The Maluku Islands (; Indonesian: ''Kepulauan Maluku'') or the Moluccas () are an archipelago in the east of Indonesia. Tectonically they are located on the Halmahera Plate within the Molucca Sea Collision Zone. Geographically they are located eas ...
.
Phonology[Visser, L. E. and C.L. Voorhoeve. 1987. Sahu-Indonesian-English Dictionary and Sahu Grammar Sketch. Dordrecht: Foris.]
Sahu, like other North Halmahera languages, is not a
tonal language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey empha ...
.
Consonants
When preceding /a/, /o/, and /u/, the consonants /d/, /ɗ/, and /l/ become retroflex (/ɖ/, /ᶑ/, and /ɭ/, respectively). The trill /r/
alternates freely with /ɾ/, but, according to Visser and Voorhoeve, /r/ is the more usual allophone. The glottal /h/ may be realized as the unvoiced
uvular fricative
Uvulars are consonants place of articulation, articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the Palatine uvula, uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stop consonant, stops, fricative consonant, ...
/χ/ by educated speakers for certain words deriving from
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
.
Vowels
The phoneme /ə/ is only found in loans (primarily from Indonesian).
References
Languages of Indonesia
North Halmahera languages
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