Reefs – Santa Cruz languages


The Reef Islands – Santa Cruz languages are a small language family comprising the languages of the Santa Cruz Islands and Reef Islands:
The debate in Oceanic linguistics dated from the Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics in 1978, where two opposing papers were presented. Peter Lincoln argued that the Reefs – Santa Cruz languages were Oceanic, while Stephen Wurm argued that they were Papuan languages.

Classification

These languages were only definitively classified as part of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian family after a series of papers that refuted the three major arguments for classifying them as either primarily Papuan languages or at least heavily influenced by a Papuan substrate.
Ross and Næss offer a retrospective conclusion: