Unika Atma Jaya, 5−7 April 2017 44 TURU HUJA, KAI BASA SEMUA: NIAS VERSION OF BAHASA INDONESIA Ingatan Gulö & Kristina Anita W. Tamba Universitas Teknokrat Indonesia atan@teknokrat.ac.id & kristinatamba37@gmail.com ABSTRACT The first half of the title above represents an Indonesian dialect spoken by Nias people in some regions in Sumatera. It is actually an Indonesian sentence meaning It rained, so the washing got wet but it is not that easy for Indonesian speakers to recognize that it is from Turun hujan, kain basah semua as most words changed in forms and the syntax is grammatically unusual. This observational research addresses these kinds of issues that Nias speaking people contribute to a variation of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by them. In addition to general observation, the writers involved some participants who were unaware that they were being observed. The findings cover interesting linguistic issues related to proper noun, syllabic feature, over generalization, inversion, and omission of voiced velar nasal sound. Linguistic variations causing these are also discussed in order to provide deeper understanding on the issues being analyzed. Keywords: accent, Bahasa Indonesia, dialect, Li Niha, Nias INTRODUCTION The construction Turu huja, kai basa semua was uttered by a young Nias girl telling what happened to the clothes she had just washed and pegged out when the family members she was staying with arrived home. As that sentence soon became known by other Indonesian speakers and was laughed at, more stories related to Nias people speaking Indonesian in a ‘funny’ way were told. Among those was Tiga kacamataku which means I have three pairs of glasses but the speakers actually meant to say I left my glasses (so I’m sorry, I can’t read the document). He pronounced tinggal ‘leave’ as tiga ‘three’, and thus conveying a really different message. Those stories had contributed to the background of conducting this research. The research question was related to the characteristics of Bahasa Indonesia spoken by Nias speaking people. As the first researcher is a native speaker of Nias language, he has been exposed to recurrent interesting examples of similar linguistic issues. The other researcher, as nonnative, contributed to this research a very important role related to perspective of Indonesian speakers in general. The data analyzed and the thoughts put together led the researchers to a conclusion that this language called Li Niha is forming another dialect of Bahasa Indonesia. This, however, will mainly hold true in certain regions in Sumatera. METHODOLOGY The data for this research were mostly obtained from observation (Kothari, 2004; Stake 2010). The observation done varies in nature from very general to specific ones. The researchers collected data while listening to people telling funny stories they had when interacting with Nias people. In many cases, those funny linguistic issues were just retold by one person to another. Sometimes, close observations were also conducted by having conversations with some Nias speaking people or simply overheard their conversations and paid attention to the way they talked. The participants, thus, were not aware that they were being observed. The researchers thought that this technique was more effective than letting them know that their language was being examined. All of the participants live in Lampung, mostly in Bandar Lampung. Some are at a college where the second writer studied and works; some are in a Nias social organization or gathering; while others are family members or relatives. Most of them just arrived in Lampung from Nias Island. The researchers also conducted library research in order to compare the collected data to Nias linguistic theories or studies (Halawa, 1983; Brown, 2001; Nazara, 2006; Lase, 2011; Blust, 2013; Gulö, 2014). By doing this, scientific explanation on how certain features occurred could be explained. ANALYSIS The researchers divided general characteristics of this Indonesian variety into five main points. They are related to certain types of pronouns, issues with consonants, and syntactic notion of subject-verb position.