Lovono (''Vano'', ''Alavano'', ''Alavana'') is a nearly extinct language of the island of

Vanikoro Vanikoro (sometimes wrongly named ''Vanikolo'') is an island in the Santa Cruz group, located to the Southeast of the main Santa Cruz group. It is part of the Temotu Province of the Solomon Islands. The name ''Vanikoro'' is always used as thou ...

in the easternmost province of the

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its ca ...

. As of 2012, it is only spoken by four speakers;Homepage of the linguist A. François
it has been replaced by the island’s dominant language, Teanu.

Name

The language name makes reference to an ancient village in the northwest of the island Banie.. In the language Lovono, which was once the dominant one in that area, the village was called ''Alavana''. In Teanu, which is now the only language spoken by the modern population, the same village is called ''Lovono''. This

language shift Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are percei ...

is reflected in the people’s preference to use the Teanu form (i.e. Lovono) both for the village name and for the ancient language that used to be associated with it. The same village – and hence the language – has been also spelled ''Whanou'' or ''Vano'' in the scientific literature, possibly reflecting an older pronunciation of the word.

The language

Some information on the languages of Vanikoro, including Lovono, can be found in for the grammar, and François (2021) for the lexicon.See also François (2022) for a general presentation.

Notes

References

* * —— (2021)
''Online Teanu–English dictionary''
with lexical data in Lovono and Tanema. Paris, CNRS. *

External links

Audio recordings in the Lovono language
in open access, by A. François (source: '' Pangloss Collection'' of

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

). Languages of the Solomon Islands Temotu languages Endangered Austronesian languages {{oceanic-lang-stub