North Bougainville languages

North Bougainville West Bougainville
Geographic distribution:	Bougainville Island
Linguistic classification:	a primary family of Papuan languages
Subdivisions:	Keriaka Konua Rotokas
Language families of the Solomon Islands. Red: North Bougainville. Blue: South Bougainville. Green: Central Solomons. Grey: Austronesian. Orange: Yele (out of area)

The North or West Bougainville languages are a small language family spoken on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. They were classified as East Papuan languages by Stephen Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue (2009).

The family includes the closely related Rotokas and Eivo language, plus two languages that are only distantly related:

• Keriaka (Ramopa) isolate
• Konua (Rapoisi) isolate
• Rotokas branch: Rotokas, Eivo (Askopan)

See also

• Papuan languages
• East Papuan languages
• South Bougainville languages

References

• Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. Science magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072.
• Malcom Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples, 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

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