There were seventeen villages on TNS, given in Figure 2: four Teun speaking, six Nila speaking, four Serua speaking, and two Wetan speaking (Wetan is a member of the Luang language/dialect cluster; ISO 639-6 [lex]).3 Four of the Nila-speaking villages were clustered together in Rumdai. Rumdai is referred to as a “township/borough” (Dutch vlek) or “region” (Dutch streek) in Holleman (1943:381, 410), and it consisted of four villages (Dutch negorij, dorpje): Kokroman, Kuralele, Ameth [ˈamet], and Usliapan.

These villages are retained as administrative villages (desa) in Waipia on Seram, as shown in Figure 3. Together, all these villages, except Yafila, comprise the district (Indonesian kecamatan) “Teon Nila Serua”, along with Nakupia and Tonetanah, two villages whose inhabitants are not from TNS. Yafila belongs to the district of Amahai.

TNS are Austronesian languages and are connected to other languages of southwest Maluku. Taber (1993) places them in a Southwest Maluku group based on lexical similarity. Grimes and Edwards (forthcoming) place them in the Southwest Maluku node of their Timor-Babar subgroup based on shared sound changes. Lexically, Nila and Serua are most similar to each other (Taber 1993), while shared sound changes support placing Teun and Nila together (Grimes and Edwards forthcoming). The lexical similarity reported by Taber (1993:405) is given in Table 1.

Within each language there are dialect differences or differences between villages. Two varieties of Nila can be identified. The variety spoken in Rumdai (Kokroman, Kuralele, Ameth, and Usliapan) has intervocalic *f > h and a split *f > f, h word initially, while Wotay and Sifluru retain *f = f in all positions. A selection of examples is given in Table 2 to illustrate.

For Teun and Nila, variant pronunciations of certain individual words occur in different villages, such as Yafila Teun mesni ‘one’ but Mesa Teun mesnu ‘one’, or Waru Serua wia ‘banana’ but Lesluru Serua bia ‘banana’.

The population figures and speaker numbers I collected are summarised in Table 3. For reasons explained further below, I believe that the actual number of speakers is higher than these numbers. Population figures for 2010 are from Badan Pusat Statisik (2012). Population figures for 2024 were collected either from the corresponding village office, or estimated based on the 2010 figures. Exact numbers of Serua speakers were not collected, due to the large number of estimated speakers in each village.

The general pattern is that people aged 65 and above can speak TNS fluently. People aged between 50 and 65 are demographically mixed: some are fluent while others have varying degrees of proficiency. Those aged below 50 are not usually fluent with only occasional exceptions. It was consistently reported that those who do not speak TNS can understand and/or have a limited degree of proficiency.

In every village except Layeni, the lists of speakers I collected have more men than women. They are most balanced in Yafila and Kokroman, with the difference attributable to the actual situation: Yafila (24 men = 57% of reported speakers), Kokroman (17 men = 59% of reported speakers). However, in other villages the difference is much higher, with at least 70% of speakers reported to be men. In all villages except Wotay and Mesa, my consultants were also men. Thus, I suspect that there are additional women who are fluent speakers in Watludan, Bumei, Sifluru, Wotay, Ameth, Usliapan, and Kuralele but who were not named by my consultants, perhaps due to differing social circles. If the figures in Table 3 were adjusted by adding these “missing” women so that there is a more balanced number of male and female speakers, it would add approximately 40 Nila speakers and 10 Teun speakers.

A further caveat must be added to the speaker numbers presented in Table 3. In each location I asked for the number of fluent (fasih or lancar) speakers. While I was explicit that this included people who were fluent in everyday speech (bahasa sehari-hari)—not just those who were particularly eloquent or who knew traditional stories—what exactly qualified as “fluent” was left to the judgment of my consultants, and there was occasionally disagreement among between them. I suspect that some of my consultants had a rather high standard in mind for a speaker to be classified as fluent, and a proper socio-linguistic survey may show there are more speakers in each village.

Before moving on, some comments on the population numbers in Table 3 are also needed. TNS district has a rather large number of immigrants from areas of Maluku other than TNS. Indeed, two villages (Nakupia and Tonetanah) are entirely made up of immigrants. In 2000, during the Maluku sectarian conflict, 8,650 internally displaced persons fled to TNS district, comprising nearly half the population (van Engelenhoven 2003:63). While many of these people have left since the end of the conflict, there remain a large number of immigrants who do not originate from TNS Islands.

Although I did not collect systematic or detailed data on language use, I report here what information I have. Each language is in regular use among speakers, which accounts for the fact that those who do not speak the language can understand it.

In Bumei it was reported that speakers use the language at home, even if their wives are not fluent speakers. In Ameth it was reported that marriage negotiations and ceremonies (masuk minta) are carried out in Nila and that when people gather, the language is frequently heard. At a traditional wedding solemnization I attended in Yafila in December 2023, I heard many people conversing in Teun before the formalities commenced and I observed my Yafila consultants conversing in Teun in July 2024.

Serua is the most vital language, and child-directed speech in Serua occasionally occurs in Serua-speaking villages. One of my Serua consultants in Lesluru reported that she uses the language with her children and grandchildren. Similarly, in Waru it was reported that the language is used on a daily basis by those above 70, and that these elders also speak it to children, but that the children respond in Ambon Malay/Indonesian. Waru is recognised throughout the area as the village in which language use is strongest. My main consultant in Waru was 36 years old and a fluent speaker of the language. He estimated that another four or five people between 30 and 40 were fluent speakers, but that no one below the age of 30 was fluent. Serua was previously taught in the primary school in Waru as part of local content (muatan lokal) but this ceased when the teacher passed away.

In most places it was reported that ritual speech (called bahasa tana in the area) is no longer spoken, but in Yafila and Lesluru a small number of elders can speak it, and it is used in appropriate contexts, such as the traditional marriage solemnization I attended in December 2023.

The patterns observed for Teun, Nila, and Serua also apply to the Wetan-speaking villages of Isu and Layeni. In Layeni my consultant explicitly reported the same pattern: those who were adults when relocated speak Wetan, but children no longer use it. Note, however, that by all reports Wetan remains in vigorous use on Wetan Island.

Taking all the above factors into consideration, I present in Table 4 an assessment of language vitality according to the UNESCO language endangerment classification (Moseley 2010) and the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) (Lewis and Simons 2010).