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North Halmahera language spoken in Indonesia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sahu (Sa’u, Sahu’u, Sau) is a North Halmahera 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.[2]
Sahu has many Ternate loanwords, a historical legacy of the dominance of the Ternate Sultanate in the Moluccas.[3]
Sahu, like other North Halmahera languages, is not a tonal language.
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 /χ/ by educated speakers for certain words deriving from Arabic.
The phoneme /ə/ is only found in loans (primarily from Indonesian).
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