Roviana is a member of the North West Solomonic branch of Oceanic languages. It is spoken around Roviana and Vonavona lagoons at the north central New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. It has 10,000 first-language speakers and an additional 16,000 people mostly over 30 years old speak it as a second language (Raymond 2005). In the past, Roviana was widely used as a trade language and further used as a lingua franca, especially for church purposes in the Western Province, but now it is being replaced by the Solomon Islands Pijin. Published studies on Roviana include: Ray (1926), Waterhouse (1949) and Todd (1978) contain the syntax of Roviana. Corston-Oliver (1996 & 2002) discuss ergativity in Roviana. Todd (2000) and Ross (1988) discuss the clause structure in Roviana. Schuelke (2020) discusses grammatical relations and syntactic ergativity in Roviana. Phonology and orthography Consonants The Roviana alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and consists of the above letters. allophones: ([+voiced]) / V_V → 'bathing' / _V [-back] → 'strong' is lightly trilled in unstressed syllables and strongly trilled in stressed syllables. Vowels V → V: / stressed Vs V → Ṽ / _N / _V → Phonotactics (C) V (C represents a single consonant and V represents a monophthong or diphthong.) Diphthongs There are five diphthongs; , , , , and The majority of lexical morphemes consist of two or three syllables. Lexical morphemes consisting of four syllables or a single syllable are uncommon whereas morphemes consisting of more than four syllables have never occurred. Stress Stress is not contrastive. Roots of one syllable, with the exception of prepositions and articles; 'go', 'come' Roots of two syllables are stressed on the initial syllables; 'talk', 'taro' Roots of more than two syllables are stressed on the first and second syllables; 'blood', 'cigarette' The nominalising infix occurs within the first syllable of the root, it always receives stress; 'eat', 'food' All material which precedes the root (prefixes and reduplicated material) is assigned stress as if it were a single root; 'fight', 'chair' The transitive suffix takes stress; 'hit him/her/it' Other suffixes, however, do not take stress and are ignored in determining the placement of stress. Material following the root is not treated as a unit for the purpose of stress assignment; 'see us (EXClusive)' The suffix does not receive stress. Stress is assigned independently to each root in a compound: → 'church ('pray' +