LDC Australia & Oceania 6/7: Savosavo
Linguistic Diversity Challenge Australia & Oceania
What is the language called in English and the language itself?
Savosavo, Savo, Savo Island
Where is the language spoken?
Savo Island, Solomon Islands, making it the easternmost Papuan language
How many people speak the language? Is it endangered?
Savosavo is currently spoken by about 2500 native speakers. It is endangered.
Almost everyone on Savo is fluent in Solomon Islands Pijin. Pijin and English are the only languages used in school. Children usually acquire Pijin only slightly later than Savosavo. (ELP)
Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?
It has been claimed that Savosavo were a member of the “Central Solomon languages”, but evidence is inconclusive at best; for what it’s worth, Savosavo should be considered an isolated language
What writing system does the language use?
The language is written in the latin alphabet with few diacritics.
What kind of grammatical features does the language have? What is its typological profile?
SOV, suffixing, postpositional, non tonal
What does the language sound like?
Listen to a sample here: https://dobes.mpi.nl/media/?id=1839/00-0000-0000-000A-3B60-1&type=2&project=savosavo
What do you personally find interesting about the language?
One of the principal investigators in the Savosavo language documentation project was a colleague of mine when I briefly worked at Bielefeld University.
The language is interesting because it is basically a remote enclave of Panuanness in the vast Ocean of Austronesian.
https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/savo1255
http://www.language-archives.org/language/svs
http://odin.linguistlist.org/igt_urls.php?lang=svs
http://endangeredlanguages.com/lang/2490
https://phoible.org/languages/savo1255
https://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_svs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savosavo_language
https://dobes.mpi.nl/projects/savosavo/