Abstract

Growing concern surrounds the threats faced by Vanuatu’s famous diversity of Indigenous languages, with particular attention directed towards the pressure that Bislama exerts as the country’s lingua franca. Here, I report the results of exploratory analyses of Vanuatu’s most recent national census, leveraging individual-level data for nearly 250,000 people to gauge the magnitude of the shift away from Indigenous languages and identify the factors implicated in this process. The data reveal that 83.9% of Vanuatu’s population can ‘easily’ speak an Indigenous language and that 74.9% learnt an Indigenous first language. Conversely, 9.6% of people cannot speak an Indigenous language (including 9.4% of Indigenous Ni-Vanuatu), and a severely conservatively-biased estimate shows that Bislama is the first language learnt for at least 14.2% of the population, including 14.3% of Ni-Vanuatu, with the true figure likely closer to 25%. The youngest generations show considerably poorer Indigenous language abilities and substantially greater learning of Bislama as a first language, a pattern consistent with a movement away from Indigenous languages over time. Further patterns that emerge indicate that Indigenous languages fare best in Vanuatu’s rural areas, in the Area Councils with the smallest populations, and in the communities that are the least diverse in terms of people’s island backgrounds. Focusing in on these rural areas, where Bislama likely poses the greatest threat to Indigenous languages, individuals who have a history of migration, who have access to modern communication technologies, who live in economically better-off households, and who live in households without kastom land tenure are less likely to speak an Indigenous language easily and are more likely to learn Bislama as a first language. While strictly correlational and non-causal, these exploratory analyses reflect both the vitality of Indigenous languages in Vanuatu today and the serious challenges they face from a suite of likely interconnected factors.

Te Reo-Volume 68-Issue 2-pp. 79–113