Mono-Alu language

Mono, also known as Alu, is an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands, belonging to the Austronesian language family. As of 1999, it was reportedly spoken by a total of 2,944 people: 660 speakers on Treasury Island, 2,270 on Shortland Island, and 14 on Fauro Island.
The Mono-Alu language has been documented by Joel L. Fagan, a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. His publication A Grammatical Analysis of Mono-Alu is the first, and currently only, translation and grammatical analysis of the Mono-Alu language.

Orthography

The Alu alphabet

The Alu alphabet has 19 letters: A, B, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, and V.
R was traditionally used more than D, but D is used more often in loanwords or in names that have been introduced into the language. It is also used to represent the allophonic variant of the phoneme /ɾ/.
The letter V is used to represent the allophonic variant of the phoneme /b/.
The letter H is sometimes replaced by F.
The length distinctions of vowels and nasals are not represented in the current orthography.
Although not in the alphabet, the letters J and Z can be used to represent the marginal phonemes /d͡ʒ/ and /z/ respectively, which only occur in loanwords.
Phonology

Consonants

There are 13 phonemic consonants in Mono-Alu.

	Labial	Coronal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal			⟨ng⟩
Plosive
Fricative
Tap		⟨r⟩
Approximant	⟨u⟩		⟨i⟩

/b/ can also be heard as fricatives under certain conditions.
/ɡ/ can be heard as in free variation.
/ɾ/ can also be heard as in free variation within word-initial position, or as when following a nasal.
/u and i/ are heard as glides within vowel environments.
Other sounds /z/ and /d͡ʒ/ only occur in loanwords.
Vowels

The Mono-Alu vowel system consists of five phonemic monophthongs and three long vowels.

	Front	Central	Back
High			,
Mid	⟨e⟩		, ⟨o⟩
Low		, ⟨a⟩

/i/ has the allophone and occurs before other vowels.
/u/ can occur as in casual speech when the vowel is short, and does not occur in word-final open syllables. The allophone occurs before /i/ and /ɛ/.
/ɔ/ has the allophonic variant and it occurs in the exclamation and is the only instance where this allophone is attested. Elsewhere, it is pronounced as .
/ɐ/ and /ɛ/ do not have allophones.
Syllable structure

The syllable structure can be either V₁ or N, where C can be any consonant, V can be any vowel, and N can be either /n/ or /ŋ/. The sequence V₁V₂ represents a long vowel if both Vs are the same phoneme, or a diphthong if they are different. In the syllable pattern N, N is a nasal syllabic nucleus.
In both the coda and nucleic positions, N is always realized as velar before /k/, /g/ /ʔ/, and /h/.

Numerals

The number system of Mono-Alu is very similar to other Austronesian languages. For example, Mono-Alu shares the words for the numbers 'two' and 'five' with the Hawaiian language. A word for 'zero' exists in the language and also holds the meaning of 'nothing.' Fagan identified the numbers from one to ten thousand in Mono-Alu.

Cardinal	English
Menna	zero
Kala	one
Elua	two
Episa	three
Ehati	four
Lima	five
Onomo	six
Hitu	seven
Alu	eight
Ulia	nine
Lafulu	ten
Lafulu rohona elea	eleven
Lafulu rohona elua	twelve
Lafulu rohona episa	thirteen
Lafulu rohona efati	fourteen
Lafulu rohona lima	fifteen
Lafulu rohona onomo	sixteen
Lafulu rohona hitu	seventeen
Lafulu rohona alu	eighteen
Lafulu rohona ulia	nineteen
Elua lafulu	twenty
Episa lafulu	thirty
Efati lafulu	forty
Lima lafulu	fifty
Onomo lafulu	sixty
Fitu lafulu	seventy
Alu lafulu	eighty
Ulia lafulu	ninety
Ea latuu	one-hundred
Elua latuu	two-hundred
Ea kokolei	one-thousand
Elua kokolei	two-thousand
Lafulu kokolei	ten-thousand

Mono-Alu also makes use of ordinal numbers. However, only 'first' is a unique word, and the rest are constructed through affixations.

Ordinal	English
famma	first
Fa-elua-naang	second
Fa-epis-naana	third
Fa-ehati-naana	fourth
Fa-lima-naana	fifth
Fa-onomo-naana	sixth
Fa-hitu-naana	seventh
Fa-alu-naana	eighth
Fa-ulia-naana	ninth
Fa-lafulu-naana	tenth

Grammar

Pronouns

Mono-Alu, like many other Austronesian languages, uses two separate pronouns for the first-person plural to express clusivity; that is, one first-person plural pronoun is inclusive, and the other is exclusive. Mono-Alu does not have third-person pronouns. Fagan translated pronouns and their possessives.

Affixes

Mono-Alu is very specific regarding adverbs and other verb affixes. Verbs can be altered with a prefix, infix, and suffix.

Prefixes		Infixes		Suffixes
ang	relative prefix, alternate forms an, ai, a'nta	fa	infix denoting completion	ai	there, away
fa	causative prefix, fa becomes f before a, alternate form ha	fang	one another, alternate form fan	ma	hither, thither, alternate form ama
ta	infix or prefix showing action or state.	fero	elsewhere, to somewhere else
		isa	together, at the same time, alternate sa
		male	again
		mea	makes a plural
		meka	until tired, for a very long time, alternate form meko

a	place where or whether, alternate form ang occurs after a
ng	added to the first of two names gives the meaning 'and', alternate form m
ua	denotes addition, 'and', 'with'

Grammatical gender

There are two ways of indicating differences of grammatical gender:

By different words: - e.g.
* Tiong 'man' – Betafa 'woman'
* Fanua 'men' – Talaiva 'women'
* Lalaafa 'headman' – Mamaefa 'head woman'
* Tua-na 'his grandfather' – Tete-na 'his grandmother'
* Kanega 'old man' – Magota 'old woman'
By using an ordinal indicative of sex: – e.g.
* Kui manuale 'baby' – Kui batafa 'baby'
* Boo sule 'boar' – Boo tuaru 'sow'

In other cases, there is no distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Adverbs

Some exceptions within the rules of Mono-Alu have been discovered.
Two adverbs of place, instead of being written with a double consonant, are written with only one accented consonant.

e.g. Nai – 'here'
'Nao – 'there'

Instead of the aspirate h, the letter f can be used:

in verbs preceded by the causative ha
* e.g. fasoku – 'let come'
in verbs preceded by the prefix han, meaning reciprocity or duality
* e.g. fanua - 'mon'
* mafa - 'I, no'
Articles

There are no definite articles in Alu. The number elea is used as an indefinite article.