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There are over one hundred local languages spread over the archipelago (listed below), all of them belonging to the Austronesian family of languages.Vanuatu is the country with the highest density of languages per capita in the world: it currently shows an average of about 1,760 speakers for each indigenous language, and went through a historical low of 565; [1] only Papua New Guinea comes close.
Clark (2009) provides the following classification of the Central Vanuatu languages, divided into geographic areas. [1] Outlier (aberrant) languages identified by Clark (2009) are in italics . Clark's Central Vanuatu branch is wider in scope, [ clarification needed ] including not only the Shepherd–Efate languages, but also the Malakula and ...
François (2011) recognizes 17 languages spoken by 9,400 people in 50 villages, including 16 living (3 of which are moribund) and one extinct language. [ 1 ] The 17 languages, ranked from northwest to southeast, are: [ 1 ] : 181
Raga (also known as Hano) is the language of northern Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. Like all Vanuatu languages, Raga belongs to the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages family. In old sources the language is sometimes referred to by the names of villages in which it is spoken, such as Bwatvenua (Qatvenua), Lamalanga, Vunmarama and Loltong.
The Southern Oceanic languages are a linkage (rather than family) of Oceanic languages spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It was proposed by John Lynch in 1995 and supported by later studies. It appears to be a linkage rather than a language family with a clearly defined internal nested structure.
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It is the only language that can be understood and spoken by the majority of Vanuatu's population as a second language. In addition 113 indigenous languages are still actively spoken in Vanuatu. [1] The density of languages per capita is the highest of any nation in the world, with an average of 2,000 speakers per language.
Proto-South Vanuatu was reconstructed by John Lynch in 2001. The language, compared to Proto-Oceanic, went through a series of vowel reductions, leading to the creation of a new vowel written as *ə, such as in *na-waiR "fresh water" resulting in Proto-South Vanuatu *nə-wai of the same meaning.