The Alas language

Università di Bologna, 2002. 198 p.
The Alas language is spoken in a small area of Northern Sumatra, more precisely in the district of Aceh Tenggara, Autonomous Province of Aceh. The main town of the area where the language is spoken is Kutacane, the Kabupaten capita townl. The town consists of a double row of houses along the main road, which comes from Kabanjahe and continues towards Blangkejeren northwards and thence, when weather conditions permit, reaches Takengon in Aceh Tengah. Southwards the road leads to the province of Sumatra Utara, the heart of the traditional territory of the Karo Bataks. Such a location justifies the relative isolation of the area, as the Alas territory is rather mountainous and there is no possibility of reaching the coast eastwards or westwards and the capital town of the province, Banda Aceh, lies in the extreme north and may be reached only following the coastal road via Medan or Takengon and Bireuen.
The Alas are maily devoted to agriculture and have lived up to our days without important contacts with the rest of the world. Their immediate neighbours are the Gayos in the north and the Karo Bataks in the south, who speak a language closely related to Alas. Contacts with the Malays from the coastal regions and the Achehs in the north must have been relatively intense, as the Alas received Islam from them. Near Kutacane small settlements of Toba Bataks may be found in Sigalegale and Lawé Désky along the road southwards. The Alas people today may amount to about 80.000 people. Although they had been contacted by the Dutch since the beginning of our century, little is known of their culture and traditions. As a matter of fact only their Adatrecht seems to have been studied by Western scholars, up to very recent times. Some information on them is to be found in Snouck Hurgronje’s volume on the Gayos, but generally the Alas people have been considered a subgroup of the Karo Bataks possibly on a linguistic basis only.