Tausūg (Bahasa Sūg)

Tausūg is spoken by about 1 million people in parts of
the Philippines, in Malaysia, and in Indonesia, particularly on
the Sulu Archipelago, the Zamboanga Peninsula, Southern Palawan
in the Philippines, in Sabah in Malaysia, and in Kalimantan in
Indonesia.

Tausūg a member of the Visayan branch of Malayo-Polynesian
languages, which is part of Austronesian language family.
Tausūg is closely related to the Butuanon language
of northeastern Mindanao.

The name of the language in Tausūg is Bahasa
Sūg, which means language of the Sūg
where Sūg is taken to mean the area in which it
is spoken (ie. Sulu). The word Tausūg is the name used
colloquially where Tau means ‘person’ and hence
Tausūg means ‘person of Sūg’ (Sulu).

These days Tausūg is written with the Latin alphabet, but
used to be written with a version of the Arabic alphabet based on
the Malaysian Jawi script.