Kwaraae

Kwara'ae is the Oceanic language spoken across Malaita, and the largest indigenous vernacular of the Solomon Islands. Its speakers include both the bush people of the interior and the salt-water people of the Langa Langa Lagoon, where feuding drove refugees onto artificial islands raised from coral and sandbars. Lagoon towns such as Laulasi became centres of shell-money manufacture, and priests guarded ancestral skulls in tabu houses.

Kwara'ae oral tradition tells of a founding ancestor who landed first on Guadalcanal and, led by a magical staff, crossed into central Malaita about twenty generations ago, his descendants spreading through the lowlands.

Spanish ships under Álvaro de Mendaña sighted Malaita in 1568, but sustained European contact waited until the chain's rediscovery in the late eighteenth century; Kwara'ae remained an unwritten language of ritual, genealogy and daily speech.