| Cheke Holo | |
| States: | Central Solomon Islands |
| Region: | Santa Isabel Island |
| Date: | 1999 |
| Ref: | e25 |
| Speakers2: | 1,500 monolinguals |
| Familycolor: | Austronesian |
| Fam3: | Oceanic |
| Fam4: | Northwest Solomonic |
| Fam5: | New Georgia – Ysabel |
| Fam6: | Ysabel |
| Fam7: | East Isabel |
| Iso3: | mrn |
| Glotto: | chek1238 |
| Glottorefname: | Cheke Holo |
Cheke Holo (also called Maringe or Mariŋe, A’ara, Holo, Kubonitu) is an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands. Its speakers live on Santa Isabel Island.
The phonology of Cheke Holo shows some peculiarities, shared with other Santa Isabel languages, like the aspirated stops and the voiceless sonorants. The five-vowel system instead conforms to the prototypical system of the Oceanic area . has /x/ rather than /ɣʰ/.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | width=20px style="border-right: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-left: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-right: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-left: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-right: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-left: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-right: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-left: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | |||
| Stop | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-right: 0;" | pronounced as /ink/ | width=20px style="border-left: 0;" | ||||||||
| pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | |||||||||||||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||||||||||||
| ɣʰ | |||||||||||||||||||
| Lateral | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||||||||||||||||
| Trill | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |||||||||||||||||
| High | pronounced as /i/ | pronounced as /u/ | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | pronounced as /e/ | pronounced as /o/ | ||
| Low | pronounced as /a/ |
Verbs in Cheke Holo are marked neither for tense nor for person, although they can be prefixed with fa- (a causative marker) and they take enclitics. Among the possible clitics are the direct object pronouns, the completive aspect markers hi and hila, and the continuative aspect marker u .
Reduplication is commonly employed with verb roots to express iteration or intensification and as a valency changing device (from intransitive to transitive), although there are attested cases of adjective and (less so) noun reduplication . Different types of reduplications are possible in Cheke Holo: