Geographic
distribution: Solomon Islands | Glottolog: None | |
 | ||
Linguistic classification: One of the world's primary language families Subdivisions: Bilua
Touo
Lavukaleve
Savosavo | ||
The Central Solomon languages are the four Papuan languages spoken in the Solomon Islands. They were identified as a family by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908 and were classified as East Papuan languages by Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009). Although some studies have tried to find if these languages are genetically related, no conclusive proof has been found by now.
The four languages are,
Pronouns reconstructions
Ross (2001) reconstructs pronouns and pronominal object suffixes (represented with hyphens) for proto-Central Solomons as follows:
Pedrós (2015) argues for the existence of the family through comparison of pronouns and other gender, person and number morphemes and based on the existence of a common syncretism between 2nd person nonsingular and inclusive. He performs an internal reconstruction for the pronominal morphemes of each language and then proposes a reconstruction of some of the pronouns of the claimed family. The reconstructions are the following: