The Central Solomon languages are the four

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...

spoken in the state 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 capit ...

. The four languages are, listed from northwest to southeast, * Bilua of

Vella Lavella Vella Lavella is an island in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands. It lies to the west of New Georgia, but is considered one of the New Georgia Group. To its west are the Treasury Islands. Environment The island of Vella Lavella is lo ...

and Ghizo islands, * Touo (also known as ''Baniata)'' of

Rendova Island Rendova is an island in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, east of Papua New Guinea. Geography Rendova Island is a roughly rectangularly-shaped island, located in the South Pacific in the New Georgia Islands. The ...

, * Lavukaleve of the

Russell Islands :''See also Russell Island (disambiguation).'' The Russell Islands are two small islands ( Pavuvu and Mbanika), as well as several islets, of volcanic origin, in the Central Province of Solomon Islands. They are located approximately northwest o ...

, and * Savosavo of

Savo Island Savo Island is an island in Solomon Islands in the southwest South Pacific ocean. Administratively, Savo Island is a part of the Central Province of the Solomon Islands. It is about from the capital Honiara. The principal village is Alialia, i ...

Classification

The four Central Solomon languages were identified as a

family Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Idea ...

by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908. The languages are at best distantly related, and evidence for their relationship is meager. Dunn and Terrill (2012) argue that the lexical evidence vanishes when Oceanic loanwords are excluded. Ross (2005) and Pedrós (2015), however, accept a connection, based on similarities among pronouns and other grammatical forms. Pedrós (2015) suggests, tentatively, that the branching of the family is as follows. ;Central Solomons * Lavukaleve– Touo * Savosavo– Bilua Savosavo and Bilua, despite being the most distant languages geographically, both split more recently than Lavukaleve and Touo according to Pedrós. Palmer (2018) regards the evidence for Central Solomons as tentative but promising. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. grouped Touo, Savosavo, and Bilua together. Lavukaleve was not included. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

Pronoun reconstructions

Pedrós (2015) argues for the existence of the family through comparison of pronouns and other gender, person and number

morphemes A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone a ...

and based on the existence of a common syncretism between 2nd person nonsingular and inclusive. He performs an

internal reconstruction Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question. The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of c ...

for the pronominal morphemes of each language and then proposes a

reconstruction Reconstruction may refer to: Politics, history, and sociology *Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company *'' Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Unio ...

of some of the pronouns of the claimed family. The reconstructions are the following:

Numerals

Central Solomon numerals from Pedrós (2015): : As the comparisons indicate, lexical evidence for the relatedness of the four languages is limited.

Vocabulary comparison

The following basic vocabulary words are from Tryon & Hackman (1982), as cited in the Trans-New Guinea database. The Savosavo data is from Claudia Wegener's field notes. :

Syntax

All Central Solomon languages have

SOV word order SOV may refer to: * SOV, Service Operations Vessel * SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank * SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands * SOV, the National Rail statio ...

except for Bilua, which has

SVO word order SVO may refer to: * Saturn Valley Online, an EarthBound MMORPG * Sheremetyevo International Airport, one three major airports serving Moscow, Russia, IATA Airport Code * Social value orientations, a psychological construct * Sparse voxel octree, a ...

due to

Oceanic Oceanic may refer to: *Of or relating to the ocean *Of or relating to Oceania **Oceanic climate **Oceanic languages **Oceanic person or people, also called "Pacific Islander(s)" Places * Oceanic, British Columbia, a settlement on Smith Island, ...

influence.

References

*Ross, Malcolm, 2001. "Is there an East Papuan phylum? Evidence from pronouns", in ''The boy from Bundaberg. Studies in Melanesian linguistics in honour of Tom Dutton'', ed. by Andrew Pawley, Malcolm Ross and Darrell Tryon: 301-322. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. *''Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History''. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. ''Science'' magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072. *Ross, Malcolm, 2005. "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages", in ''Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan speaking peoples'', ed. by Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson: 15-65. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. *Pedrós, Toni, 2015. "New arguments for a Central Solomons family based on evidence from pronominal morphemes". ''Oceanic Linguistics'', vol. 54, no. 2 (358-395).

External links

Central Solomons languages database at TransNewGuinea.orgCentral Solomons word lists
(Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database) {{Language families East Papuan languages Languages of the Solomon Islands Language families