Proto-Oceanic (abbreviated as POc) is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant of the Proto-Austronesian language (PAN), the common ancestor of the Austronesian languages. Proto-Oceanic was probably spoken around the late 3rd millennium BCE in the Bismarck Archipelago, east of Papua New Guinea. Archaeologists and linguists currently agree that its community more or less coincides with the Lapita culture.

Linguistic characteristics

The methodology of comparative linguistics, together with the relative homogeneity of Oceanic languages, make it possible to reconstruct with reasonable certainty the principal linguistic properties of their common ancestor, Proto-Oceanic. Like all scientific hypotheses, these reconstructions must be understood as obviously reflecting the state of science at a particular moment in time; the detail of these reconstructions is still the object of much discussion among Oceanicist scholars.

Phonology

The phonology of POc can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty. Proto-Oceanic had five vowels: *i, *e, *a, *o, *u, with no length contrast. Twenty-three consonants are reconstructed. When the conventional transcription of a protophoneme differs from its value in the IPA, the latter is indicated: Based on evidence from the Southern Oceanic and Micronesian languages, Lynch (2003) proposes that the bilabial series may have been phonetically realized as palatalized:.

Basic word order

Many Oceanic languages of New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Micronesia are SVO, or verb-medial, languages. SOV, or verb-final, word order is considered to be typologically unusual for Austronesian languages, and is only found in some Oceanic languages of New Guinea and to a more limited extent, the Solomon Islands. This is because SOV word order is very common in some non-Austronesian Papuan languages in contact with Oceanic languages. In turn, most Polynesian languages, and several languages of New Caledonia, have the VSO word order. Whether Proto-Oceanic had SVO or VSO is still debatable.

Lexicon

From the mid-1990s to 2023, reconstructing the lexicon of Proto-Oceanic was the object of the Oceanic Lexicon Project, run by scholars Andrew Pawley, Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond. This encyclopedic project produced 6 volumes altogether, all available in open access. In addition, Robert Blust also includes Proto-Oceanic in his Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (abbr. ACD).

Animal names

Selected reconstructed Proto-Oceanic terms of various animals from Blust's ACD: ! Proto-Oceanic !! Common name !! Scientific name ! Proto-Oceanic !! Common name !! Scientific name ! Proto-Oceanic !! Common name !! Scientific name

Plant names

Pawley and Ross (2006)

Reconstructed Proto-Oceanic terms for horticulture and food plants (other than coconuts): ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning

Ross (2008)

Reconstructed plant terms from Malcolm Ross (2008): ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning ! Proto-Oceanic !! Meaning

Blust and Trussel (2020)

Selected reconstructed Proto-Oceanic terms of various plants from the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary: ! Proto-Oceanic !! Common name !! Scientific name

Pottery

There are several known reconstructed words evident of material pottery culture among the Lapita:

Example sentences

From Lynch, Ross, and Crowley (2002): 'The pig bit a/the person.' 'The house is mine.' From Ross (2004): 'I brought your child (to you) to the beach.' 'They went down to bind up the canoe.'