Languages of the Solomon Islands archipelago

Language families of the (geographic) Solomon Islands
Red: North Bougainville
Blue: South Bougainville
Green: Central Solomons
Grey: Austronesian

There are between sixty and seventy languages spoken in the Solomon Islands archipelago^[1] (as opposed to the nation state of Solomon Islands, which covers a smaller area).^[2] The lingua franca is Pidgin, and the official language is English.

Language families[]

Most of the languages in the Solomon Islands are Austronesian languages. The Central Solomon languages such as Lavukaleve constitute an independent family.

Two other language families are represented on Bougainville, which is geographically part of the Solomon Islands, if not within the national boundaries.

The status of the Reefs – Santa Cruz languages were once thought to be non-Austronesian, but further research found them to be divergent Austronesian languages.^[3] The neighbouring languages of Vanikoro are also heavily relexified Austronesian languages.^[4]

An indigenous sign language, Rennellese Sign Language, has gone extinct.

List of the Solomon Islands languages[]

Italics indicate that a language is extinct.

Notes[]

Further reading[]

• François, Alexandre (2009), "The languages of Vanikoro: Three lexicons and one grammar" (PDF), in Evans, Bethwyn (ed.), Discovering history through language: Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross, Pacific Linguistics 605, Canberra: Australian National University, pp. 103–126
• Ross, Malcolm; Næss, Åshild (2007). "An Oceanic origin for Äiwoo, the language of the Reef Islands?". Oceanic Linguistics. 46 (2): 456–498. doi:10.1353/ol.2008.0003. hdl:1885/20053.
• Tryon, Darrell T.; Hackman, Bryan D. (1983). Solomon Islands languages: an internal classification. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. doi:10.15144/PL-C72.
  • Data set derived from Tryon & Hackman (1983): Greenhill, Simon, & Robert Forkel. (2019). lexibank/tryonsolomon: Solomon Islands Languages (Version v3.0). Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3535809