Gayo is an Austronesian language spoken by some 260,000 people in the central highlands of the Indonesian province of Aceh, at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. Gayo belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family of languages (Ross 1995, Blust 1999). Nothofer (1994) places Gayo along with Nias, Mentawai, Enggano and the various Batak languages in a North-West Sumatra/Barrier Islands subgroup. Five distinct but mutually intelligible dialects are recognised within Gayo: Bukit, Dëret, Cik, Serbejadi and Lues.