Solos is an

Austronesian language The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...

Buka Island Buka Island is the second-largest island in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, in eastern Papua New Guinea. It is in Buka Rural LLG of North Bougainville District, with the Autonomous Region's and district's capital city of Buka, Bougai ...

in the

Autonomous Region of Bougainville In developmental psychology and morality, moral, political, and bioethics, bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Auto ...

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. Approximately 15,000 people (2022) are estimated to speak Solos as a first language out of an ethnic population of about 17,000 (2022).

Alphabet

Solos uses an adapted

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

of 22 characters, five of which are

vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

, two are digraphs, and one is the

saltillo Saltillo () is the capital and largest city of the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila and is also the municipal seat of the municipality of the same name. Mexico City, Monterrey, and Saltillo are all connected by a major railroad and high ...

symbol, which in practical writing and typing is often expressed as a simple

apostrophe The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one o ...

. The letters are (vowels in bold): a, b, d, e, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, ng, o, p, r, s, t, ts, u, w, y, ꞌ ⟨ng⟩ is used for /ŋ/, ⟨ts⟩ is used for /t͡ʃ/, ⟨y⟩ is used for /j/, and ⟨ꞌ⟩ is used for the glottal stop /ʔ/. The other letters are approximately phonetic.

Phonology

Solos has about 21 core

phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

: 5

and around 16

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

. The usage of some of these phonemes tend to vary in some words by dialect or village, as well as exhibiting some

free variation In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such ...

from person to person, but there are enough invariant words across the language area to establish the core phonemes.

Consonants

voiced alveolar lateral approximant The voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral ...

⟨ l⟩ also occurs phonetically in Solos (rarely), but has so far been analyzed as an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

of /n/, and almost exclusively occurs in

with ⟨n⟩ and/or in

borrowed words A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

. The irony that the name of the language, ''Solos'', contains an ⟨l⟩ is probably due to the fact that the nearby closely related languages have an /l/ phoneme.Allen, Jerry & Matthew Beaso (1975)
"Petats Phonemes and Orthography"
Retrieved 03 Apr 2025. The /b/ phoneme also has an

⟨ β⟩, which is a

voiced bilabial fricative The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B. The official symbol is the ...

. It primarily appears when /b/ occurs between two vowels, although it does rarely occur word-initially in free variation with ⟨b⟩.

Vowels

Solos has a relatively straight-forward five-vowel system. There is some variability in the produced vowel sounds, but within each vowel phoneme the produced phonetic range tends to center on the base phonetic sound described in the chart. All of these vowels can also be part of

diphthongs A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

, although it is difficult to differentiate between true diphthongs and separate

syllables A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

when two or more vowel sounds are adjacent.

References

{{Languages of Papua New Guinea Northwest Solomonic languages Languages of Papua New Guinea Languages of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville