The South Bougainville or East Bougainville languages are a small
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hist ...
spoken on the island of
Bougainville in
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
. They were classified as
East Papuan languages
The East Papuan languages is a defunct proposal for a family of Papuan languages spoken on the islands to the east of New Guinea, including New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville, Solomon Islands, and the Santa Cruz Islands. There is no eviden ...
by
Stephen Wurm
Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist.
Early life
Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...
, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in ''
Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
'' (2009).
Languages
The languages include a closely related group called ''Nasioi'' and three more divergent languages tentatively classified together under the name ''Buin:''
*Buin branch ?
**
Buin
**
Motuna
**
Uisai
*Nasioi branch
**
Koromira
**
Lantanai
**
Naasioi
**
Nagovisi
**
Oune
**
Simeku
Proto-South Bougainville
Pronouns
Ross reconstructed three pronoun paradigms for proto-South Bougainville, free forms plus agentive and patientive (see
morphosyntactic alignment
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between Argument (linguistics), arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', an ...
) affixes:
:
:''SG: singular; DL: dual; PL: plural''
Lexicon
A detailed historical-comparative study of South Bougainville has been carried out by Evans (2009).
[Evans, Bethwyn. 2009. Beyond pronouns: further evidence for South Bougainville. In Bethwyn Evans (ed.), ''Discovering history through language: Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross'', 73-101. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.] Reconstructed Proto-South Bougainville lexicon from Evans (2009):
;Proto-South Bougainville reconstructed lexicon
:
Austronesian influence
South Bougainville words of likely
Proto-Oceanic
Proto-Oceanic (abbr. ''POc'') is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant ...
origin:
:
Typology
South Bougainville 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 station ...
, unlike the SVO Oceanic languages.
See also
*
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 geogra ...
*
North Bougainville languages
The North Bougainville or West Bougainville languages are a small language family spoken on the island of Bougainville Island, Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. They were classified as East Papuan languages by Stephen Wurm, but this does not now s ...
References
*''Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History''. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill,
Ger Reesink
Gerard P. Reesink (more commonly known as Ger Reesink) is a Dutch linguist who specializes in Papuan languages.
Education
He studied psychology at Utrecht University. He obtained his PhD in linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he com ...
, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. ''Science'' magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072.
* Malcolm Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, ''Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples,'' 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
{{language families
East Papuan languages
Language families
Languages of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville