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.

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 affixes:

Lexicon

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

Austronesian influence

South Bougainville words of likely Proto-Oceanic origin:

Typology

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