Fonds Alexandre François — Îles Salomon

The present archival fonds brings together all the field recordings carried out by researcher Alexandre François in the Solomon Islands (South Pacific), between 2005 and 2012. Those 93 audio recordings document the four languages spoken on the island of Vanikoro, in the province of Temotu, the easternmost province of the Solomons. The main language is Teanu, with about 1000 speakers. Then two moribund languages are also documented, namely Lovono [4 speakers] and Tanema [1 speaker]. Finally, a fourth language is Tikopia, a Polynesian Outlier language spoken by a community of settlers living in the south of Vanikoro. To those four languages, one can add Pijin, the lingua franca of the Solomons, which was occasionally used during recordings. Most of these archival resources constitute the first ever documents for languages that are at the risk of disappearing soon.