Contents

Languages of the Solomon Islands archipelago

Languages of the Solomon Islands archipelago
Language families of the Solomon Islands archipelago Red: North Bougainville Blue: South Bougainville Green: Central Solomons Grey: Austronesian
Official	English
Indigenous	Several languages
Vernacular	Pijin, Solomon Islands English
Keyboard layout	QWERTY, US

Between 60 and 70 languages are spoken in the Solomon Islands archipelago^[1] which covers a broader area than the nation state of Solomon Islands,^[2] and includes the island of Bougainville, which is an autonomous provinceofPapua New Guinea (PNG). The lingua franca of the archipelago is Pijin, and the official language in both countries is English.

Language families[edit]

Most of the languages in the Solomon Islands archipelago are Austronesian languages.

The Central Solomon languages such as Bilua, Lavukaleve, Savosavo and Touo constitute an independent family within the Papuan languages.^[3]

Two other language families are represented on Bougainville, which forms part of the nation of Papua New Guinea but is geographically part of the archipelago.

The status of the Reefs – Santa Cruz languages were once thought to be non-Austronesian, but further research found them to be divergent Austronesian languages.^[4] The neighbouring languages of Vanikoro are also heavily relexified Austronesian languages.^[5]

An indigenous sign language, Rennellese Sign Language, has gone extinct.

Languages of the Solomon Islands archipelago[edit]

Italics indicate that a language is extinct.

Footnotes[edit]

Sources[edit]

• François, Alexandre (2009), "The languages of Vanikoro: Three lexicons and one grammar" (PDF), in Evans, Bethwyn (ed.), Discovering history through language: Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross, Pacific Linguistics 605, Canberra: Australian National University, pp. 103–126
• Obata, Kazuko (2003). A Grammar of Bilua: a Papuan language of the Solomon Islands (PDF). Pacific Linguistics 540. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. The Australian National University. doi:10.15144/PL-540. hdl:1885/146708. ISBN 0-85883-531-2.
• Ross, Malcolm; Næss, Åshild (2007). "An Oceanic origin for Äiwoo, the language of the Reef Islands?". Oceanic Linguistics. 46 (2): 456–498. doi:10.1353/ol.2008.0003. hdl:1885/20053.
• Tryon, Darrell T.; Hackman, Bryan D. (1983). Solomon Islands languages: an internal classification. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. doi:10.15144/PL-C72.
  • Data set derived from Tryon & Hackman (1983): Greenhill, Simon, & Robert Forkel. (2019). lexibank/tryonsolomon: Solomon Islands Languages (Version v3.0). Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3535809