Sangirese

The Sangirese, who call themselves Tau Sanger, are the Austronesian people of the Sangihe and Talaud islands between northern Sulawesi and Mindanao, with an ancient offshoot, the Muslim Sangil, settled around Sarangani in the Philippines. Austronesian voyagers reaching the islands in the first millennium BCE merged with earlier inhabitants. The Sangirese trace their descent from Gumansalangi, a cultural hero placed around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when their islands answered to the Muslim rulers of Maluku.

In the sixteenth century the Sultanate of Ternate subdued the Sangihe Islands and Portuguese ships reached them. Spanish rule in the seventeenth century left loanwords in the Sangirese language, before Dutch occupation from 1677.

The islanders prospered as middlemen and smugglers, fishing and growing nutmeg. By the early nineteenth century their trading settlements had spread to Sulawesi around Tabukan and to Ternate and Halmahera.