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Owa Language
The Owa language is one of approximately 70 languages spoken in the Solomon Islands. Owa is comprised of roughly 8,000 speakers in total, residing in the islands of Santa Anna, Santa Catalina, and Star Harbour of San Cristobal. Each location consists of a separate dialect. All three locations are categorized under the Makira province, which is the home of the Owa language.

Owa is a Central Eastern Oceanic language and can be categorized as a branch of the Austronesia family. The Austronesian language family is rather large and expands from the Pacific Islands to Madagascar. There are roughly 60 Austronesian langauges spoken in the Solomon Islands

Phonemes
Owa language consists of twenty letters and nineteen phonemes. Of these nineteen phonemes, fourteen are consonants and five are vowels.

Consonants can be separated into four different categories: labial (sound initiating from the lips), alveolar (initiating from the upper teeth), velar (pronounced from the back of the tongue), and glottal (originating from the glottis).

Among these four categories are seven subcategories:
 * voiceless stops, voiced stops, vibrants, voiceless fricatives, voiced fricatives, nasals, and approximants

Owa language has uniquely lengthened segments which is used to distinguish semantic meaning.
 * ssss translates to ‘yes, I agree’ in English.

While the Owa language has velar consonants, there is no voiced velar stop or alveolar stop. Because Owa lacks a phonemic glottal stop, ɣ is a fricative which acts as a substitute.

Vowels
Owa language consists of 5 phonemic vowels, ɪ, ʊ, ɛ, ɔ, ɐ, separated in three categories: front (ɪ, ɛ), central (ɐ), and back (ɔ ʊ). Long and short vowels are used to distinguish word tense.

While vowels can be nasalized before nasal consonants, this nasalization is not phonemic.

Stress
An apostrophe is used to signify stress. For instance, the second to last syllable is usually stressed in the Owa language. Occasionally, the third to last syllable will be stressed.
 * au'.ra.gi translates to the word 'married' in English
 * 'fe.fe.ne translates to 'female' in English

Most times, the stress will depend on the context, specifically where it is located in the sentence, therefore, it is difficult to predict stress patterns in Owa.

Nouns and Pronouns
Generally speaking, nouns in Owa are simple, however, the pronouns and markers used with them are more complex and provide more details.

While English only distinguishes singular and plural forms, Owa distinguishes between singular, dual, and plural, which is a characteristic of most Oceanic languages. Pronouns have both inclusive, which include the speaker, and exclusive forms, which exclude the speaker. Similar to nouns, pronouns also fall into three separate categories: singular, dual, and plural.

Unlike English, the Owa language has a food classifier which is restricted to describe the possession of food. The language consists of markers that distinguish between edible and drinkable possessions.
 * Edible possession: -qa, -mwa, -na
 * Non-edible (general) possession: -ku, -mu, -na/ni

Similar to Spanish, there are gender-specific articles.
 * Male names are accompanied with the article o or ko
 * Female names are proceeded by Ka

Object suffixes also serve to establish the person and number.
 * The singular form for 1st person exclusive is –au
 * 2nd person singular is –go

Owa utilizes inalienable nouns that are distinguished by possessive suffixes. Inalienable nouns are only used when discussing body parts or intimate people.

On the contrary, alienable nouns describe ownership. For instance, people use alienable nouns when the noun is less personal.
 * To say 'my knife' in Owa, you would say naefe ia-ku

There are some cases where it is difficult to distinguish alienability.

Adjectives
Owa has few adjectives.
 * kere translates to 'small' in English and appears before the noun
 * faoru translates to new, mafana translates to 'hot, masuri translates to black, which all appear after the noun

Because Owa only consists of a few adjectives, other means are used to describe nouns. To name a few, articles, clauses and particles serve to transform nouns.

When constructing sentences, the constituent order is (specifier) (adj.) Head (adj.) (modifier construction) (dem) (ana). To begin, the specifier acts as an article and the head is the noun. The modifier construction includes either a number, possession or relative clause which is used to describe the noun preceding because the adjectives are relatively vague.

Conjunctions
Conjunctions have both male and female forms in Owa, which is a characteristic that rarely appears in Oceanic languages. There are separate words to indicate whether the conjunction is conjoining a feminine or a masculine entity. Mo appears to refer to males and mika refers to females.

Example: Jon   mika    Mary    mo    Pita John   and    Mary    and    Peter 'John, Mary, and Peter'

The purpose of these separate male and female conjunctions raises cultural questions, however, the reasons of these gender distinctions are unknown to linguists.

Verbs
There are four main types of verbs:
 * one-place verbs, two-place verbs, noun-modifiers, and adverbs

One-place verbs: Art coconut               tall    very 'That coconut palm is very tall.'
 * A    niu      kana   ke   tewa   wau

Two-place verbs:
 * sino-a translates to 'sweep it'
 * sino translates to sweep

Noun-modifiers: belly           protrude 'His belly protrudes'
 * A-oqa-na  ke    qote

Similar to English, nouns are able to be transformed to verbs.
 * 'judgment' vs. 'judge' in English
 * 'quote' means protrude vs. 'qote-a' which means you push out

Mellow, G. (2013). A dictionary of Owa a language of the Solomon Islands (Pacific linguistics ; 639). Boston: De Gruyter.