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BANGSAMORO VIRTUAL MUSEUM
Tausug
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People speaking Tausug (Bahasa Sug) arrived at the Sulu Archipelago some 8—years ago, in the estimation of the linguistics community. The language has the highest cognacy with Butuanon, a language of the northeastern Mindanao from where the Tausug speakers originated. Tausug, Butuanon, and Cebuano are classified as Central Philippine languages. The historical record is replete with information about the fast, vigorous emergence of the Tausug people in Sulu as early as the 13th century as a Muslim community abiding by the central authority of a sultanate, engaged in global commerce, literate in jawi and linked by alliance across the ports of Southeast Asia. This busy context rendered Tausug identity formation as, according to anthropologist Jowell Canudan, “a trajectory rather than as unchanging fact of being…a rooted cosmopolitanism that does not necessarily constitute a singular condition but rather a contested and distinctively multifaceted phenomenon.”