Roviana language

Roviana
Native toSolomon Islands
Regionnorth central New Georgia Island
Native speakers
(9,900 cited 1999)[1]
L2 speakers: 16,000 (1987)[1]
Austronesian
Language codes
ISO 639-3rug
Glottologrovi1238
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Roviana is a member of the North West Solomonic branch of Oceanic languages. It is spoken around Roviana and Vonavona lagoons at the north central New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. It has 10,000 first-language speakers and an additional 16,000 people mostly over 30 years old speak it as a second language (Raymond 2005). In the past, Roviana was widely used as a trade language and further used as a lingua franca, especially for church purposes in the Western Province, but now it is being replaced by the Solomon Islands Pijin. Published studies on Roviana include: Ray (1926), Waterhouse (1949) and Todd (1978) contain the syntax of Roviana. Corston-Oliver (1996 & 2002) discuss ergativity in Roviana. Todd (2000) and Ross (1988) discuss the clause structure in Roviana. Schuelke (2020) discusses grammatical relations and syntactic ergativity in Roviana.[2]

  1. ^ a b Roviana at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ Schuelke, Peter (2020). Grammatical Relations and Syntactic Ergativity in Roviana: A little-described language of the Solomon Islands. Honolulu, HI, USA: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.