Solomon Islands Culture & Language

Solomon Islands culture is Melanesian and intensely local — there is no single national tradition so much as several hundred related ones.

Music

Panpipe ensembles from Malaita and Guadalcanal, with bamboo pipes of different lengths played by groups in interlocking parts, are the best-known form. Bamboo band music, struck with rubber thongs on open bamboo tubes, developed in the twentieth century and is played everywhere. A recording of a Baegu lullaby from Malaita was sampled on a track that became an international hit in the 1990s, and the resulting dispute over consent and royalties is a well-known case in the ethics of recording.

Carving

The Western Province, particularly around Marovo Lagoon, produces carving in kerosene wood and ebony inlaid with nautilus shell — bowls, figures and the nguzunguzu, the head that was once lashed to the prow of a war canoe.

Shell money

Made on Malaita from shells ground into discs, drilled and strung, and still used in bride price and compensation. Making it is skilled and slow.

Custom dance

Performed with feathers, shell ornament and body paint, and specific to clan and occasion rather than staged generally.

The canoe

Before outboards, the war canoe — the tomoko of the Western Province — was the centre of a whole complex of skill and status: planks sewn and caulked without nails, inlaid with nautilus shell, and carrying the nguzunguzu figurehead at the waterline to ward off the spirits that were thought to cause storms. A few are still built for ceremony, and the shape remains the single most recognisable Solomon Islands object.

Food

Root crops — taro, yam, cassava — fish, coconut, and motu cooked on hot stones. Betel nut is chewed widely.

English is the official language, used in government, schooling and business, and is spoken by many though not all Solomon Islanders.

Solomon Islands Pijin is the true lingua franca and what you will hear everywhere. It is an English-based creole and is not hard to follow once your ear adjusts — mi for I, yu for you, olketa for they, waka for work, lukim yu for see you. A little effort with it goes a very long way.

More than seventy indigenous languages are spoken, most Melanesian, with Polynesian languages on a few outlying islands. Many people speak three or four.

Useful Pijin: gudfala moning for good morning, tanggio tumas for thank you very much, hao nao for how are you, and nomoa wari for no worries.