Trisha Shetty (Editor)

South Bougainville languages

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Geographic distribution
  
Bougainville Island

Glottolog
  
sout2948

Subdivisions
  
Buin Nasioi

South Bougainville languages

Linguistic classification
  
One of the world's primary language families

The South or East Bougainville languages are a small language family spoken on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. They were classified as East Papuan languages by Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009).

The languages include a closely related group called Nasioi and three more divergent languages tentatively classified together under the name Buin:

  • Buin branch ?
  • Buin (Terei) isolate
  • Motuna (Siwai) isolate
  • Uisai isolate
  • Nasioi branch: Koromira, Lantanai (Daantanai’), Naasioi, Nagovisi (Sibe), Oune (Ounge), Simeku

    • Pronouns

    Ross reconstructed three pronoun paradigms for proto-South Bougainville, free forms plus agentive and patientive (see morphosyntactic alignment) affixes:

    SG: singular; DL: dual; PL: plural

    References

    South Bougainville languages Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA