Cheke Holo (also called Maringe or Mariŋe, A’ara, Holo, Kubonitu) is an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands. Its speakers live on Santa Isabel Island.
Cheke Holo | |
---|---|
Native to | Central Solomon Islands |
Region | Santa Isabel Island |
Native speakers | (10,800 cited 1999)[1] 1,500 monolinguals[1] |
Austronesian
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | mrn |
Glottolog | chek1238 |
The phonology of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area (White, Kokhonigita & Pulomana 1988). Boswell (2018:16) has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.
Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m̥ | m | n̥ | n | ɲ̊ | ɲ | ŋ̊ | ŋ | |||
Stop | plain | p | b | t | d | t͡ʃ | d͡ʒ | k | ɡ | ʔ | |
aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | ||||||||
Fricative | plain | f | v | s | z | ɣ | h | ||||
aspirated | ɣʰ | ||||||||||
Lateral | l̥ | l | |||||||||
Trill | r̥ | r |
Front | Central | Back | |
---|---|---|---|
High | i | u | |
Mid | e | o | |
Low | a |
Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with fa- (a causative marker) and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers hi and hila, and the continuative aspect marker u (Boswell 2018).
Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device (from intransitive to transitive), although there are attested cases of adjective and (less so) noun reduplication (Boswell 2018). Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo: