Cheke Holo language


Cheke Holo is an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands. Its speakers live on Santa Isabel Island.

Phonology

The phonology of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area. has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.
FrontCentralBack
High
Mid
Low

Morphosyntax

Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with fa- and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers hi and hila, and the continuative aspect marker u.
Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device, although there are attested cases of adjective and noun reduplication. Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo: