South Bougainville languages

The South Bougainville 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 Stephen Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009).

Classification

Glottolog v4.8 presents the following classification for the South Bougainville languages:

Proto-South Bougainville

Pronouns

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

Lexicon

A detailed historical-comparative study of South Bougainville has been carried out by Evans (2009). Reconstructed Proto-South Bougainville lexicon from Evans (2009):

Austronesian influence

South Bougainville words of likely Proto-Oceanic origin:

Typology

South Bougainville languages have SOV word order, unlike the SVO Oceanic languages.

See also

• Papuan languages
• North Bougainville languages

References

• Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, 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.