Proto-Oceanic (abbreviated as POc) is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family.
Proto-Oceanic was probably spoken around the late 3rd millennium BCE in the Bismarck Archipelago, east of Papua New Guinea.
[1] Archaeologists and linguists currently agree that its community more or less coincides with the Lapita culture.
When the conventional transcription of a protophoneme differs from its value in the IPA, the latter is indicated: Based on evidence from the Southern Oceanic and Micronesian languages, Lynch (2003) proposes that the bilabial series may have been phonetically realized as palatalized: /pʲ/ /ᵐbʲ/ /mʲ/.
In addition, Robert Blust also includes Proto-Oceanic in his Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (abbr.