Southern Oceanic languages

Southern Oceanic
Geographic
distribution
Vanuatu, New Caledonia
Linguistic classificationAustronesian
Proto-languageProto-Southern Oceanic
Subdivisions
GlottologNone
 Southern Oceanic

The Southern Oceanic languages are a linkage (rather than family) of Oceanic languages spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It was proposed by John Lynch in 1995 and supported by later studies. It appears to be a linkage rather than a language family with a clearly defined internal nested structure.

Classification

Clark (2009) groups the North Vanuatu and Central Vanuatu languages together into a North–Central Vanuatu (NCV) group and also reconstructs Proto-North–Central Vanuatu, but this is not accepted by Lynch (2018).

In addition to the Reefs – Santa Cruz languages and the Meso-Melanesian languages of the western Solomon Islands, Geraghty (2017) 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.: 823–826  Nevertheless, languages in the eastern Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal, Malaita, Makira, and adjacent islands, are much more conservative, and not as lexicaly aberrant as the Temotu languages and languages of the western Solomons.

Languages

Following Clark (2009) 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.

Lynch (1995)

Lynch (1995) tentatively grouped the languages as follows:

The non-nuclear branches are subsumed under Northern Vanuatu.

Ross, Pawley, & Osmond (2016)

Ross, Pawley, & Osmond (2016) propose the following internal classification for Southern Oceanic.: 10 

See also


This page was last updated at 2023-11-27 10:32 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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