The Huaulu language is spoken by a small forest people on the north side of Seram, the largest island in Maluku. The count of speakers stands at about 300, a figure that dates from 1987 and may no longer be accurate. It belongs to the same Austronesian family as the Indonesian language, yet its words for the numbers one to ten, its songs and its hunting vocabulary are different from anything heard in Ambon or Masohi. This page explains where the Huaulu language is spoken, how it is related to its neighbours, what makes its number system distinctive, and why it is under pressure.
Where the Huaulu language is spoken
Huaulu is a mountain settlement in Seram Utara district of Central Maluku regency. It lies on one of the walking routes towards Mount Binaiya, the highest peak of Seram, and the last stretch is on foot: from the point where the vehicle road ends, a hilly track of about five kilometres leads up to the houses. The drive to that starting point runs along the Saka to Sawai highway north of Masohi, the regency seat. From Ambon the whole trip, by land and sea, takes most of a day.
The speakers do not all live in the mountains. Some families have moved down to the coast, and a few households live in the transmigration area at Bessi. They still call themselves Huaulu and still send food and goods up and down between the lowland and the mountain homes: fresh sea fish goes up to the hills, and the coastal relatives bring it. The language area is therefore a scatter of settlements around the southern end of Saleman Bay, close to the town of Opin, rather than a single village.
Where the language sits among Seram’s languages
Huaulu is part of the Central Maluku group of Austronesian languages, in the Nunusaku branch, and within that it belongs to the Patakai and Manusela subgroup. Its closest relatives are therefore Manusela, spoken by several thousand people in the mountains and around Teluti Bay, and Nuaulu, spoken by people on the south coast of Seram. Manusela is the larger neighbour, with about 7,000 speakers counted in 1989. Nuaulu has about 2,000.
The relationship is known to the Huaulu themselves in terms of family. Huaulu consider the Nuaulu of the south coast to be brothers and themselves the sisters. Manusela is counted as kin as well. Hunting rights follow the same lines: because of old ties to the Manusela side, Huaulu hunters are still allowed to follow game into Manusela territory. Their hunting ground runs into the Manusela forest, and the protected area of that name is described on the Manusela National Park page.
A number system built on ten
The most distinctive feature of the language is its counting. Huaulu uses a decimal system, and the words are short and regular. One to ten run: esa, hua, tolu, hate, lima, nome, hitu, walu, siwa and hutusa. The word for ten, hutusa, is a contraction of hutu and esa, meaning one unit of ten. The numbers from eleven to nineteen are built by saying ten, then eha, which works like the word plus, then the unit, so that eleven is hutusa eha esa and nineteen is hutusa eha siwa.
The tens combine hutu with the unit: hutu hua for twenty, hutu tolu for thirty, and so on up to hutu siwa for ninety. The word hutu may also be pronounced futu with no change in meaning, which is why both forms are heard. A hundred is utuna and a thousand is usati, and two thousand is usati hua. The counting words contain no borrowings from Malay, although lima, five, happens to be the same word as in Indonesian and in a great many other Austronesian languages. Neighbouring Seram languages show related forms: siwa for nine and a ten built on hutu appear in other lists from the island.
Songs and the spoken record of the past
Huaulu is also the language of memory. The everyday speech of the community carries its history in two kinds of verse. Kapata are sung poems about heroic wars that the ancestors fought. Lani are laments that keep the sad stories of earlier generations: a natural disaster, or a betrayal by one person that brought ruin on a whole group. Both forms are spoken or sung in the old language rather than in Ambonese Malay, and they depend on the old language to carry them.
The vocabulary of work is equally specific. A man is reckoned an adult when he can set a snare, called taliem, pound sago, called wetiam, and open a garden, called wehilawaem. Together the three words mark out what a grown man is expected to do. The mutual-help principle that underlies community work has its own phrase, karisa sopo asie, which is close to the meaning of masohi, the name of the regency seat. It covers building a house, hunting together and holding ceremonies.
What the language describes: houses, food and forest
The speakers live in a landscape of tree ferns, sago palms and mist. The older part of the settlement keeps its traditional houses, called luma hotofafa. They stand on stilts and are built of materials taken from the forest: tree-fern posts, walls of sago-frond stalks, floors of bamboo or nibung palm, and roofs of sago leaf. These houses stay at a steady temperature day and night. Raising the community meeting house, a baileo, is a shared task that has its own phrase, tau kohoira luma potoam, and the building belongs to the wider Maluku tradition described on the baileo house page.
Food comes from the forest and the garden. Sago is the staple, with bananas, cassava, taro, sweet potato and rice. Men hunt and trap pig, deer and cuscus and catch eels and river fish. A set of taboos, known in Ambonese Malay as pamali, controls what may be eaten and by whom, and it is part of the ancestral religion of the Huaulu, which is called Memaham. Betel chewing, with areca nut, lime and tobacco, is shared by men and women and offered to guests, and it is the usual way of showing welcome.
Men wear a red headband in everyday life. The old style is to let the two ends hang over the shoulders. In the Huaulu tradition the headband belongs to men who have passed the rite of passage into adulthood, called cidaku. Other peoples of Seram call the Huaulu the red-headed people.
A language alongside Ambonese Malay
People in the settlement also speak Ambonese Malay, the trade language of central Maluku, and for most dealings outside the settlement it is the language used. That is a normal arrangement across Seram, where every small language sits beside a lingua franca. In the neighbouring Nuaulu communities, people who keep the ancestral religion use their own language more, while converts to Christianity tend to use Ambonese Malay, particularly at school.
The reasons for people moving down to the coast are practical. Families who became Protestant Christians settled on the coast, and so did parents who wanted their children to attend school, because the mountain school is small and has only a few teachers. Whether Huaulu survives in those households depends on whether the parents speak it to their children every day.
The pressures on the language
Several things work against the language at once. The first is size: a few hundred speakers cannot easily replace themselves if a generation switches to Malay. The second is movement. The transmigration houses at Bessi and the coastal villages are places where Huaulu families live among speakers of other languages. The third is the arrival of services and media. The mountain settlement has had electricity for only part of each day, and a mobile telephone signal reached it only in recent years. Children now use the wireless connection in the village office when the power is on. Everything that arrives through these channels arrives in Indonesian or Ambonese Malay.
The community itself is not passive. The old part of the mountain settlement refuses to have its road asphalted, because that would break a taboo, and the traditional houses are still built and used. Cooperative work, initiation, the kapata and lani and the hunting taboos continue to be carried out in Huaulu. Those practices are exactly the situations in which the language is spoken, which is why they matter for its survival.
Reaching the area and what lies nearby
Most visitors reach Huaulu on the way to or from Mount Binaiya, whose trail starts near the settlement. The mountain is described on the Mount Binaiya page, and the town where the regency offices stand and from which the road north begins is covered on the Masohi page. Routes between Ambon and Seram are covered on the getting around Maluku page, and the whole island is introduced on the Seram Island page.
A visitor arriving on foot is a guest of a community that values good manners and the local rules. The settlement is small, the old part is a place where taboos apply, and the people are reserved with strangers at first but friendly and helpful once they know you. Some activities, such as certain ways of fishing, may not be filmed, so ask before recording anything, and accept the betel if it is offered.
Related guides: Nuaulu Language: The Tongue of the Seram Highlands.