Abstract

Language loss in Vanuatu has been attributed to speech communities shifting to Bislama, the lingua franca of the archipelago, due to the increasing urbanisation of islanders. This paper discusses the need to consider the handful of Vanuatu indigenous languages which dominate the current linguistic map of rural Vanuatu by size of their speech community, with a total number of speakers representing about 40% of the population of Vanuatu. The social factors that led to the existence of the largest language communities of Vanuatu, the reasons and makeup of their community of speakers, remain to be investigated. To illustrate this point, this paper describes the composition of Raga, one of these large speech communities. The aim of this article is to stimulate the interest of linguists and anthropologists in identifying the reasons and circumstances that lead speakers to use these languages with, or instead of, their first language.

Te Reo-Volume 68-Issue 2-pp. 114–132