Akei

The Akei are an Oceanic-speaking Melanesian people of the southwestern coast of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, centred on the village of Tasiriki, whose name means small water. Their speech bears several local names, and neighbouring varieties shade into one another along a dialect chain whose ends are no longer mutually intelligible. The Akei share Santo's Lapita past, the island having been settled by Austronesian navigators some three thousand years ago.

Europeans first reached Santo with Queirós's Spanish expedition in 1606; Bougainville followed in 1768 and James Cook in 1774, after which the islands appeared on European maps as the New Hebrides.