Sakao

The Sakao are an Oceanic-speaking Melanesian people of the northeastern horn of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, settled around Port-Olry and Hog Harbour, the two villages giving their names to the dialects of the Sakao tongue. Outsiders named them after the offshore islet of Sakao, which the people themselves call Ladhi.

Although their language is a close cousin of the neighbouring Tolomako, it has undergone drastic sound change, probably within the last thousand years, so that the two peoples can no longer understand one another. Sakao country lay near the route of the first European visitors: Pedro Fernandes de Queirós made the first recorded European landing on Santo in 1606, and Bougainville and Cook returned in 1768 and 1774.