Numee

The Numee are the Kanak people of southern Grande Terre in New Caledonia and the nearby Isle of Pines. Their Numèè language, also called Kwényi, is spoken around Yaté and Le Mont-Dore.

Together with Ndrumbea, Numèè forms the extreme-southern branch of the New Caledonian languages, tracing back to Lapita fishing villages established on these coasts after 1100 BC. Despite the resemblance of names, Numèè is probably not the tongue that gave Nouméa its name; that was likely Ndrumbea.

Numee clans farmed the valleys behind the southern lagoon and crossed by canoe to the Isle of Pines, whose tall column pines so struck James Cook in 1774 that he named the island on the spot. He did not stay, and whalers were only occasional callers afterward, leaving the Numee world undisturbed well into the nineteenth century.