Southern Oceanic languages


The Southern Oceanic languages are a linkage of Oceanic spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It was proposed by Lynch, Ross, and Crowley in 2002 and supported by later studies. They consider it to be a linkage rather than a language group with a clearly defined internal nested structure.

Classification

Clark groups the North Vanuatu and Central Vanuatu languages together into a North–Central Vanuatu group and also reconstructs Proto-North–Central Vanuatu, but this is not accepted by Lynch.
In addition to the Reefs – Santa Cruz languages and the Meso-Melanesian languages of the western Solomon Islands, Geraghty notes that many Southern Oceanic languages are often lexically and typologically aberrant languages likely with Papuan substrata – particularly the Santo, Malakula, South Vanuatu, and New Caledonian languages, and perhaps also some Central Vanuatu languages of Ambrym and Efate. Nevertheless, languages in the eastern Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal, Malaita, Makira, and adjcacent islands, are much more conservative, and not as lexicaly aberrant as the Temotu languages and languages of the western Solomons.

Languages

Following Clark and Glottolog 4.0, four major groups can be delineated, which are North Vanuatu, Central Vanuatu, South Vanuatu, and New Caledonian. All four groups are linkages.
tentatively grouped the languages as follows:
The non-nuclear branches are subsumed under Northern Vanuatu.

Ross, Pawley, &; Osmond (2016)

Ross, Pawley, & Osmond propose the following internal classification for Southern Oceanic.