Teanu (or ''Puma'', ''Buma'') is the main language spoken on 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 thoug ...

, 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 capita ...

About the language

Name

The language receives its name from Teanu, the island located northeast of the Vanikoro island group. The same language has also been known in the literature as ''Puma'' (or wrongly ''Buma''), after the main village of Teanu island..

Sources

The very first source about the languages of Vanikoro were wordlists collected in 1834 by French naturalist

Joseph Paul Gaimard Joseph Paul Gaimard (31 January 1793 – 10 December 1858) was a French naval surgeon and naturalist. Biography Gaimard was born at Saint-Zacharie on January 31, 1793. He studied medicine at the naval medical school in Toulon, subsequent ...

, as he took part in the first voyage of ''Astrolabe'' (1826-36) led by

Dumont d'Urville Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (; 23 May 1790 – 8 May 1842) was a French explorer and naval officer who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. As a botanist and cartographer, he gave his nam ...

. On top of his botanical and zoological work, Gaimard collected, and later published, about ten pages of wordlists in Teanu, Tanema and Lovono. In this work, the three languages were labelled respectively “Tanéanou”, “Tanema”, and “Vanikoro”. More data was collected in the 1980s by Australian linguist Darrell Tryon; he described Teanu using the name “Buma”. The languages of Vanikoro are currently being studied by French linguist

Alexandre François Alexandre François is a French linguist specialising in the description and study of the indigenous languages of Melanesia. He belongs t''Lattice'' a research centre of the CNRS and École Normale Supérieure dedicated to linguistics. Research ...

Geographical distribution

Whereas Teanu used to be confined to the northeast part of the island group, during the 20th century it became the main language of the whole island group of Vanikoro, at the expense of the two other indigenous languages Lovono and Tanema. While the Melanesian population of

now speaks Teanu, the southern coast of the island also has been colonised for a few centuries by a

Polynesia Polynesia () "many" and νῆσος () "island"), to, Polinisia; mi, Porinihia; haw, Polenekia; fj, Polinisia; sm, Polenisia; rar, Porinetia; ty, Pōrīnetia; tvl, Polenisia; tkl, Polenihia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of ...

n population, who still keep strong ties with their homeland, the nearby island of

Tikopia Tikopia is a high island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It forms a part of the Melanesian nation state of Solomon Islands but is culturally Polynesian. The first Europeans arrived on 22 April 1606 as part of the Spanish expedition of Pedro Fer ...

. Their main language is

, even though some speak Teanu as a second language.

Phonology

The phoneme inventory of Teanu includes 19 consonants and 5 vowels. François (2021), Introduction to the Teanu dictionary –
Phonology

Consonants

The labiodental fricative /v/ can be freely devoiced , especially word-initially. By contrast, the phoneme /s/ is always heard voiceless.François (

2009 File:2009 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The vertical stabilizer of Air France Flight 447 is pulled out from the Atlantic Ocean; Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States; 2009 Iran ...

2021 File:2021 collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021; Protesters in Yangon, Myanmar following the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, coup d'état; A civil demonstration against the October–November 2021 ...

), ''pace'' Tryon (2002). Teanu does not have a phonemic palatal glide //: the sound only exists as an allophone of /i/ before another vowel: e.g. ''iebe'' .e.ᵐbe~ e.ᵐbe‘besom, broom’.

Vowels

Teanu has 5

phonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

vowels, /i e a o u/. Tryon (2002) proposed that vowel length may be contrastive, but more recent research has found this to be incorrect: the language only has five short vowels .

Notes

References

* * François, Alexandre (2021)
''Online Teanu–English dictionary, with equivalents in Lovono and Tanema''
Electronic publication, open access. Paris: CNRS. * * * *

External links

Basic vocabulary list in Teanu (Buma)
(site: ABVD)
Audio recordings in the Teanu language
in open access, by

(source: ''

Pangloss Collection The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access ...

'' 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 31,637 ...

). {{Austronesian languages Languages of the Solomon Islands Temotu languages