The South or East Bougainville languages are a small language family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 spoken on the island of Bougainville

Bougainville Island

Bougainville Island is the main island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville of Papua New Guinea. This region is also known as Bougainville Province or the North Solomons. The population of the province is 175,160 , which includes the adjacent island of Buka and assorted outlying islands...

 in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...

. They were classified as East Papuan languages

East Papuan languages

*Baining family*North Bougainville family — Bougainville*South Bougainville family — Bougainville*Central Solomon family...

 by Wurm, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in Ethnologue

Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...

(2009).

The languages include a closely related group called Nasioi and three more divergent languages tentatively classified together under the name Buin:

• Buin branch
  • Buin isolate
  • Motuna (Siwai) isolate
  • Uisai isolate
• Nasioi branch: Koromira
  Koromira language
  Koromira is an East Papuan language spoken in the mountains of southern Bougainville Province, Papua New Guinea....
  
  , Lantanai, Naasioi
  Naasioi language
  Naasioi is an East Papuan language spoken in the central mountains and southeast coast of Kieta District, Bougainville Province, Papua New Guinea.-Vowels:-Consonants:Nasals can be syllabic....
  
  , Nagovisi
  Nagovisi language
  Nagovisi or Sibe is an East Papuan language spoken in the mountains of southern Bougainville Province, Papua New Guinea....
  
   (Sibe), Oune, Simeku
  Simeku language
  Simeku is an East Papuan language spoken in the mountains of southern Bougainville Province, Papua New Guinea....
  
  

Pronouns

Ross reconstructed three pronoun paradigms for proto-South Bougainville, free forms plus agentive and patientive (see morphosyntactic alignment

Morphosyntactic alignment

In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and those of intransitive verbs...

) affixes:

	I	we	you	s/he, they
free	*ni(ŋ)	*nee DL *ni PL	*da SG *dee DL *dai PL	*ba SG *bee DL *bai PL
patientive	*-m		*-d	*-b
agentive	*a	*o	*i or *e	*u

SG: singular; DL: dual; PL: plural