| Central Solomons | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Solomon Islands |
| Linguistic classification: | a primary family of Papuan languages |
| Subdivisions: |
Bilua
Touo
Lavukaleve
Savosavo
|
Language families of the Solomon Islands.
Red: North Bougainville. Blue: South Bougainville. Green: Central Solomons. Grey: Austronesian. Orange: Yele (out of area) |
|
The Central Solomon languages are four distantly but demonstrably related languages of the Solomon Islands, identified as a family by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908. They were classified as East Papuan languages by Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009).
The four languages are,
The pronouns Ross reconstructs for proto-Central Solomons are,
| I | *ŋai, *a | s/he & I | *e-le, *-ge | exclusive we | *a, *e |
| thou & I | *mai-le ?, *-be | inclusive we | *mai ?, *-me | ||
| thou | *ŋo, *-ŋa | you two | *-bele | you | *me, *-me |
| she | *ko, *-ma | they two (F) | *-lo | they | *-ma |
| he | *vo, *lo, *-va, *-la | they two (M) | *-la |