Mono, or Alu, is an Oceanic language of Solomon Islands reported to be spoken by 660 people on Treasury Island (Mono proper), 2,270 on Shortland Island (Alu dialect), and 14 on Fauro Island in 1999.

Phonology

Mono-Alu language has been studied extensively by Joel L. Fagan, a researcher for the Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. His publication, "A Grammatical Analysis of Mono-Alu (Bougainville Straits, Solomon Islands)," is one of the first and only translations and analysis of Mono-Alu language. Fagan identified the Mono-Alu language as having twenty-eight phonemes. They are made up of nine diphthongs, five vowels and fourteen consonants that make up the alphabet.

The Alu alphabet

Pronunciation

Pronunciation of vowels

Pronunciation of diphthongs

Pronunciation of consonants

The other consonants have the same sounds as in English.

Numerals

The number system of Mono-Alu is very similar to other Austronesian languages. For example, Mono-Alu shares the numbers 'two' (elua) and 'five' (lima) with the Hawaiian Polynesian language. A number for 'zero' was available in the language, but it was under the same use as the word 'nothing.' Fagan identified numbers from one to ten-thousand in Mono-Alu. Mono-Alu also made use of ordinal numbers. However, only 'first' (famma) is an actual word, where all other successive numbers are a grammatical construct.

Grammar

Mono-Alu, like many other Austronesian languages, uses two separate pronouns for the first-person plural. One is inclusive, including the listener, and the other is exclusive, not including the listener. There are also no third-person pronouns available in the language. Fagan translated pronouns and their possessives. Mono-Alu is very specific regarding adverbs and other verb affixes. Verbs can be altered with a prefix, infix, and a suffix. Mono-Alu grammar also follows rules of gender.

Nouns

Gender of nouns

There are two ways of indicating differences of gender: In other cases, there is no distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter. Some exceptions within the rules of Mono-Alu have been discovered. Two adverbs of place, instead of being written with a double consonant, are written with one only accentuated. Instead of the aspirate h, the letter f can be used: There is no word for 'the' in the language.

Articles

There is no definite article in Alu. There is no indefinite article such as 'a, an'; it is replaced by the indefinite number elea ('one').