Central Solomon languages


The Central Solomon languages are the four Papuan languages spoken in the state of the Solomon Islands.
The four languages are, listed from northwest to southeast,
The four Central Solomon languages were identified as a family by Wilhelm Schmidt in 1908. The languages are at best distantly related, and evidence for their relationship is meager. Dunn and Terrill argue that the lexical evidence vanishes when Oceanic loanwords are excluded. Ross and Pedrós, however, accept a connection, based on similarities among pronouns and other grammatical forms.
Pedrós suggests, tentatively, that the branching of the family is as follows.
;Central Solomons
Savosavo and Bilua, despite being the most distant languages geographically, both split more recently than Lavukaleve and Touo according to Pedrós.
Palmer regards the evidence for Central Solomons as tentative but promising.

Pronoun reconstructions

Pedrós argues for the existence of the family through comparison of pronouns and other gender, person and number morphemes and based on the existence of a common syncretism between 2nd person nonsingular and inclusive. He performs an internal reconstruction for the pronominal morphemes of each language and then proposes a reconstruction of some of the pronouns of the claimed family. The reconstructions are the following:
1 singular2 singularinclusive/
2 non-singular		1 exclusive
Pre-Savosavo*a-ɲi*no*mea-
Pre-Touoe̤noe*mee̤-
Pre-Lavukaleve*ŋai*ŋo*mee
Pre-Bilua*ani/*aŋai*ŋomee-
Proto-Central Solomons*ani/*aŋai*ŋo*me*e

Numerals

Central Solomon numerals from Pedrós :
As the comparisons indicate, lexical evidence for the relatedness of the four languages is limited.

Syntax

All Central Solomon languages have SOV word order except for Bilua, which has SVO word order to due Oceanic influence.