Abstract

Espiritu Santo, the largest island of Vanuatu, is known as a global hotspot of linguistic diversity, but this diversity remains severely underdocumented. This pilot study aims to determine the scale of linguistic diversity on Santo in greater detail based on newly collected lexical data from 17 varieties, ensuring dense geographical coverage of a selected area in the western half of the island. Adopting the methodology of the main previous study of the area, Tryon (1976), shared cognacy rates among the varieties are calculated. These results are compared to diachronic and typological patterns in the phonologies of the varieties, and to the results of a lexical variation analysis. Based on these findings, a few additional languages can be postulated in the studied area, alongside six previously identified languages, as well as greater dialectal variation. The language ideologies of speakers of these varieties are also discussed employing the Indigenous term lanwis in order to test how the etic results of the linguistic data analysis correspond to speakers’ emic perceptions of lanwis boundaries. This study demonstrates that the extreme linguistic diversity of western Santo is greater and geographically more complex than previously assumed, and highlights the urgency of further documentation and analysis of Santo’s linguistic varieties.

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