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Linguistic Background And Classification
Gayo is an Austronesian language spoken by some 100,000 people (2000) in the mountainous region of Aceh around Central Aceh, Bener Meriah, and Gayo Lues regencies. It is classified as belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages, but is not closely related to other languages. Ethnologue lists Deret, Lues, Lut, and Serbejadi-Lukup as dialects. Gayo is distinct from other languages in Aceh. The art and culture of the Gayo people is also significantly different compared with other ethnic groups in Aceh.

Gayo is classified as a 6b language by Ethnologue. In other words, it is still used for face to face communication among the Gayo people, but it is losing speakers. While Gayo has no orthographical representation, it has a significant oral tradition, Dindong. Dindong is an oral literary genre which has great social significance and is commercially produced as a cassette tape.

The Historical Development Of The Gayo People And Language
The earliest attestation of Gayo is in the 14th century Malay-language Hikayat raja Pasai. In the 17th century (1607-1637), the Gayo people became part of the kingdom of the Acehneses sultan Iskandar Muda. During Muda's reign, many of the Gayo people were converted to Islam. In the 1870s the Gayo and the Acehnese fought together against the Dutch in the Aceh-Dutch war, facilitating much intermingling between the two peoples. As the Dutch were victorious, Aceh fell under Dutch control and i n 1907, G.A.J. Hazeu wrote the first Gayo–Dutch dictionary for the colonial authorities of the Dutch East Indies. This occupation ended in the Second World War with the Japanese invasion of Indonesia. In 1947, Indonesia declared its independence and Aceh became a part of the Republic of Indonesia. Speakers of Gayo now speak at least two languages. Gayo is used among the immediate community for all face to face interaction and Bahasa Indonesia is used for communications with those who are not in the immediate Gayo community. Many speakers of Gayo also speak Arabic and Acehnese.

General Economy Of The Gayo People
The Gayo people rely on an economy that is for the most part agricultural. The Gayo people produce crops such as coffee and rice. They also raise cattle and buffaloes. In Lake Tawar, a body of water in the center of the Gayo region, there is a fish unique to the lake called depik . While consumed by the Gayo people themselves, this fish is sought after throughout Sumatra and wider Indonesia and is a significant source of revenue for the Gayo.

Vowels
Gayo has 8 vowel phonemes, seen below. Gayo has three front vowels /ɪ/, /e/, and /ɛ/, two central vowels, /ɘ/ and /a/, as well as three back vowels /ʊ/, /o/, and /ɔ/. The two diphthongs /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ are no longer use in everyday speech. Instead they occur only in poetic speech.

Consonants
All consonants in Gayo can appear word initially or medially. However, only voiceless plosives, fricatives, plain nasals, rhotics (trills) and laterals can appear word finally.

Funny Nasals
'Funny nasals' are an unusual group of nasals which are contrasted with normal nasals. They originate from nasal + plosive combinations in which the plosive is now in a transitional phase of disappearing and being present. They are not typically included in the consonant chart for Gayo as they only occur in the speech of adults who are approximately older than 60 years. The phonetic representation of funny nasals in Gayo is simply the regular nasal with the addition of ^. For instance the phonetic representation of the regular bilabial nasal /m/ in Gayo is [m̂]. Funny nasals can only appear on the onset of a stressed syllable. The actual place of articulation of funny nasals is in fact the same as it is for regular nasals. Funny nasals most often appear in words which are borrowed from Malay. Below are two examples of words which both contain funny nasals and are borrowed from Malay.

time [tim̂ɤ:] 'bucket'.

lemu [lɘm̂u] 'cow'.

Intonation
Intonation (the raising or lowering of pitch during the production of an utterance) in Gayo conveys a wide variety of information including everything from caution or surprise to contrastive emphasis. For instance, in declarative utterances, there is "a rising intonation falling at the end of the predicate" at the end of the phrase.

Syllable Structure
The syllable structure in Gayo is (C) V (C). The four possible syllable structures are listed below. In Gayo, word roots are usually mono- or disyllabic, trisyllabic forms exist, albeit with less frequency.

Stress
In Gayo there are two kinds of stress, Lexical Stress and Phrase Stress.

Lexical Stress
Stressed syllables are separated from unstressed syllables by their higher pitch and longer duration. Gayo has moraic iambic stress. Consequently, primary word stress falls on the final syllable of the word while secondary stress falls on the penultimate syllable. It is also important to note that reduplicated forms have double word stress.

Phrase Stress
Phrase stress is slightly more noticeable than lexical stress and always falls on the last word of the phrase.

Morphology
Gayo is a language in which words are formed by attaching affixes to roots to form complex words. Gayo has two basic words classes: noun and verb. Nouns are generally not inflected for "number, plurality, or definiteness". Pronouns on the other hand are often inflected for both number and plurality. Adjectives are not a distinct category in Gayo. Words which function as adjectives are in fact a certain kind of intransitive verb.

Gayo employs a range of morphological processes from affixation to reduplication and cliticization.

Derivational Affixes
Gayo has a large variety of prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and two specific types of confix (infix + suffix and circumfix (prefix + suffix)). It also has three kinds of verbal affixes, voice affixes, valence increasing affixes, and affixes which derive intransitive verbs.

Below are a couple examples of affixation in Gayo which give a sense of the general scope of its functions in Gayo.

1) pen-dere

INSTR-hit

'stick for hitting with' (i-dere 'hit' (transitive verb)).

INSTR=instrumental

The prefix pen nominalizes both transitive and intransitive verbs by transforming them into an noun with which one can use to perform the action the verb previously referred to.

2) Pe-kunul

T.EXT-kunul

“Sit for a while”

(T.EXT refers to temporal extension added to a verb to indicate ongoing or persistent states).

3) Jeroh-en oya      bidak     umah=ti=ni

good-COMP  that      than      house=our=this

'that (house) is better than our house'.

(COMP refers to a comparative suffix)

Clitics
Clitics in Gayo have a variety of roles such as determiner, possession, subject/object distinction, pronominal, and reduced word function. Below are two examples

Determiner Clitics
Determiner clitics in Gayo indicate definiteness such as the English 'this' or 'that'.

For example, jema 'person' and wa is a determiner enclitic, thus jema=wa 'that person'.

Possessive Clitics
In order to indicate first person possession in Gayo, the enclitic =(ng)ku is used.

I-tipak=é                      asu=ngku

UO-kick=3.N.SUBJ     dog=1.POSS

'he kicked my dog'.

UO=undergoer orientation

N.SUBJ=non-subject

1.POSS=first person possessive

Particles
Particles (units that represent the minimal phonological criteria for a word, but cannot exist without a host word) in Gayo convey information such as focus or illocutionary force, and in some cases possession. The example below shows the use of the possessive particle n= to indicate third person posession.

kôrô       n= ama

buffalo POSS=father

'father's buffalo'.

Reduplication
In Gayo, both partial and full reduplication are present. Partial reduplication generally functions to express a semantic notion, such as iterativity. Full reduplication however indicates a kind of emphasis. In general, there are three kinds of reduplication in Gayo. There is reduplication that is an inherent structural feature of a word. In other words, as opposed to reduplication functioning as a derivational process, there are words which only exist in reduplicated form. There is also reduplication which functions to form new words. Finally, there is syntactic reduplication which can indicate plurality or intensity. This is different from reduplication which forms new words as there is no categorical change in the syntactic or grammatical characteristics of the word after reduplication. Words that begin with a vowel can only have partial reduplication. Consonant-initial words can have both reduplication processes. It is not entirely clear why one reduplication process is chosen over the other in a consonant initial word.

Partial reduplication
Below is an example of partial reduplication expressing plurality.

Ke-Kiding  ni         akang   sedep    le,        pôn

RED-foot  POSS    deer    delicious FOC   uncle.

'deer feet (plurality) are delicious, uncle.'

RED=reduplication

FOC=focus

Full reduplication
Below is an example of full reduplication in Gayo expressing intensification, often translated as 'really'.

Ike jarak-jarak k=onè,    gëre    mu-kunah

If   RED-far     to=there   not    INTR-problem

'If it's really far to get there, it doesn't matter.'

INTR=intransitive

Dvandva compounds
Dvandva compounds are made up of two words whose meanings are combined to create a compound which encompasses the meaning of both words. Dvandva compounds originally come from Sanskrit. Dvandva compounds can consist of two nouns which then form one new noun, or two verb roots which then form an intransitive verb predicate. Dvandva compounds also can consist of two synonyms which make a new term which expresses a more intense meaning than either of the original two terms. In these cases, one of the two terms is often borrowed from Mala y. Below are examples of the above described phenomena.

The example below shows a dvandva compound which combines two nouns to make a new term.

Bersi-èngon-en beru-bujang

RECIP-see         girl-boy

'The girls and boys looked at each other'.

The example below shows a dvandva compound which combines two verb roots together to make an intransitive verb predicate.

Wè gëre  pané  tulic-baca

3     not    clever  write-read

'He is not good at reading and writing.' (i-tulis 'write' (transitive verb), i-buca 'read' (transitive verb)).

The example below shows a dvandva compound which combines two synonyms to make an intensified term.

Ara    resam       si     harus-turah i-buet-en

EXIST custom  REL   must-must  UO-do-CAUS1

'there is a custom which must be performed.'

EXIST=existential

REL=relative clause

UO=undergoer orientation (2/3 person actor)

CAUS1=causative suffix

Syntax
Gayo (along with many Austronesian languages) has neither an active/passive or ergative/absolutive system. Word order is dependent on which of three voice orientations the predicate in the clause is in. Predicates can either be actor-oriented, undergoer-oriented, or decontrol undergoer oriented. Actor-oriented predicates (marked by the actor orientation prefix mun-) refer to deliberate action and can be both transitive and intransitive. Undergoer-oriented predicates (marked with the undergoer orientation prefix i-) refer to actions in which the thing undergoing the action is emphasized and are transitive in all cases in which the undergoer is not an oblique argument. Decontrol undergoer-oriented predicates (marked with the decontrol undergoer-prefix ter-) are transitive and indicate an action which is done accidentally, or unwillingly; actions which are impossible to realize are also indicated with the prefix ter-. The three sentences below are examples of each of these phenomena and their respective word orders.

Another important note is that the two properties which are often found in a singular "subject", agentivity and autonomy, are split between an argument which conveys agentivity and an argument which conveys the grammatical subject.

Actor-oriented clauses.
S              V            O

Ama mumungan dengké=a

Father     AO=eat  meat=that

'Father ate the meat'.

AO=actor orientation

Transitive, actor-oriented clauses have the word order SVO. Actor-oriented predicates almost always use the prefix mun.

Undergoer-oriented clauses.
As previously mentioned undergoer-oriented clauses in Gayo are transitive in all cases in which the undergoer is not an oblique argument.

V             S            O

I-pangan Ama     dengké=a

UO-eat   father   meat=that

‘Father ate the meat’.

UO=undergoer orientation

Decontrol undergoer-oriented clauses.
Decontrol undergoer-oriented clauses tend to have the same word order as undergoer-oriented clauses.

V                S         O

Te-pangan     ama    dengké=a

DC.UO-eat  father    meat=that

'father accidentally ate the meat.'

DC.UO=decontrol undergoer orientation

Decontrol undergoer-oriented predicates use the prefix Te(r).

Intransitive clauses
In the case of intransitive clauses, the subject usually comes after its predicate. However to indicate emphasis, it can appear before it. Examples of both phenomena are given below.

R[em]alan    wè

INTRA-walk   3

PREDICATE SUBJECT

'He is walking.'

INTRA=intransitive.

wè              R[em]alan

3                INTRA-walk

SUBJECT PREDICATE

'he is walking'.