Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language, Solomon Islands

In Short

This book is a systematic grammar and dictionary of the Lau language spoken by coastal communities on Big Malaita and surrounding islets in the Solomon Islands. Walter George Ivens documents the sound systems, parts of speech, syntax, and daily vocabulary of Lau speakers. He focuses particularly on the dialect used by migrants at Port Adam on Little Malaita. Driven by missionary linguistic work, the text traces how Lau maintains its core Austronesian identity while absorbing neighboring Sa'a words through marriage and Christian mission schooling. It remains a foundational document of early twentieth-century Melanesian linguistics.

The Story

The book opens with a geographical and cultural survey of the Lau-speaking peoples, who inhabit artificial islets off the northeast coast of Big Malaita in the Solomon Islands. Ivens details the movement of Lau speakers along the coast, tracing historical migrations to settlements like Port Adam on Little Malaita, 80 miles to the south. In Port Adam, Lau communities live surrounded by Sa'a-speaking populations, leading to intense language contact and structural borrowing. Intermarriage with women from the nearby hills introduces non-Lau vocabulary into daily domestic life.

The introduction of Christianity accelerates this linguistic evolution. Missionaries and native village teachers rely on existing Sa'a printed books, causing Sa'a words, phrasing, and grammatical forms to filter into Lau translations of sacred texts. Ivens sets out to isolate and eliminate these foreign importations, attempting to reconstruct and preserve the purest Lau forms—traditionally spoken on islets like Sulufou near Atta Cove—while remaining faithful to the living speech he recorded from Port Adam informants and during stays on the mainland.

The central narrative of the work shifts to a methodical breakdown of Lau grammar. Ivens starts with the article system, showing how speakers classify objects using general particles like na or specific markers such as fe for spherical items and si for individual pieces. He investigates the complete absence of grammatical gender, the mechanics of pluralization through particles like gi, and the distinct pronouns used for dual, trial, and plural groupings. The grammar examines possessive structures, which vary depending on whether an item is intended for eating, drinking, or general ownership, revealing how local cultural practices shape syntactic categories.

From nominal structures, the work moves to verbal mechanics. Lau relies on verbal suffixes and prefixes to adjust transitive force, cause actions, or signal reciprocal relationships. Negation, conditional clauses, and directionals are systematically categorized using illustrative phrases drawn from oral communication and translated scriptures.

The text culminates in an extensive English-Lau and Lau-English vocabulary. Each entry pairs Lau words with definitions, cultural notes, and comparative root forms from neighboring languages like Sa'a, Mota, and Florida. Through these entry pairings, the vocabulary captures the material culture, flora, fauna, and environmental worldview of the Lau people, preserving their terms for sea voyages, fishing, reef life, and traditional social order.

How It Unfolds

Mapping the territory Ivens establishes the geographic boundaries of Lau speech along the artificial islets of Big Malaita and traces historical migrations down to Port Adam on Little Malaita.

Tracing language contact The author outlines how intermarriage with hill tribes and the introduction of Sa'a-language Christian schoolbooks gradually altered the native Lau dialect.

Parsing articles and nouns The analysis moves into grammar, detailing how Lau uses specialized articles for spherical objects, small pieces, and familial relationships while lacking grammatical gender.

Constructing pronouns and possession The text details complex pronominal forms, distinguishing between inclusive and exclusive groups alongside specialized possessive markers used exclusively for food and drink.

Deconstructing the verb system Ivens explains how transitive suffixes, causative prefixes, and negative particles alter verb roots to construct complex conditional and relative clauses.

Cataloging the vocabulary The final section provides a comprehensive dictionary, matching Lau terms with English definitions, comparative Melanesian roots, and notes on local flora, fauna, and maritime life.

The People

Walter George Ivens The author and linguist who seeks to document, organize, and preserve the Lau language. Driven by a desire for structural purity, he works to identify true Lau grammatical forms while filtering out recent Sa'a linguistic borrowings.

The Port Adam Informants Lau-speaking islanders whose ancestors migrated south from Suraina to Little Malaita. They provide Ivens with the living spoken dialect, maintaining their native speech despite being surrounded by Sa'a neighbors and intermarrying with inland hill communities.

Rev. A. I. Hopkins A missionary colleague stationed at Mangoniia whose notes, local observations, and commentary assist Ivens in clarifying obscure word usages, such as the specific application of food terms and regional variations in fatherhood titles.

In Its Own Voice

"Lau is the name given to the language spoken by the inhabitants of the artificial islets which lie off the northeast coast of Big Malaita, Solomon Islands."

— The author establishes the physical setting and primary speakers of the dialect in the book's opening sentence.

"The women of the hill peoples above Port Adam have largely been procured as wives for the Port Adam men and thus there has been a tendency for the distinctiveness of the Lau language to disappear..."

— Ivens notes how traditional marriage patterns with neighboring groups altered the vocabulary of the coastal settlements over time.

"The numerical system is decimal. All numbers over the tens are expressed in tens."

— The grammar defines the mathematical logic underlying Lau counting and numeric composition.

What It's Really About

The book explores how human communities preserve their identity through speech during periods of displacement, intermarriage, and rapid cultural change. On one level, it is a formal description of an Austronesian language, documenting its grammatical rules and lexical inventory. Beneath the technical analysis lies an investigation into language contact and shift. Ivens shows how geographical isolation on artificial reef islands fostered unique speech patterns, while regional trade, migration, and mission education constantly threatened to submerge those distinct features under dominant neighboring tongues. The text implicitly asks how a language retains its essential structure when its speakers live on the margins of other linguistic communities.

Why Read It Today

This work appeals to historical linguists, anthropologists, and readers interested in the cultural history of the Pacific Islands. Reading it feels like looking through an early twentieth-century scholar's field notebook, where precise grammatical tables sit alongside observations of daily island life, sea travel, and canoe construction.

The book demands patience from modern readers. It presents technical grammatical jargon without modern linguistic glosses, and its dictionary entries rely on dated transcription methods. Furthermore, the text carries period colonial and missionary attitudes toward indigenous cultures, framing language standardization around church literacy and scripture translation.

What remains powerful is the sheer density of detail preserved in the dictionary. Through entries covering everything from star patterns and ocean currents to fishing nets and ancestral ghosts, the book offers an irreplaceable record of the Lau people's historical worldview and their intricate relationship with the Solomons maritime environment.