Yela

The Yela are the people of Rossel Island, a mountainous island ringed by coral reefs at the eastern end of the Louisiade Archipelago off New Guinea. Linguists treat their language, Yélî Dnye, as an unclassified language isolate, with a large inventory of doubly articulated consonants and a special women's speech in which words connected with the sea are avoided.

The islanders occupied small villages along the coast and fertile valleys, keeping largely to themselves behind the dangerous reefs. Europeans first sighted the island in 1606, when the Spanish expedition of Luís Vaez de Torres charted it together with Tagula as the Land of Saint Bonaventure; the French d'Entrecasteaux expedition named it after the officer Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard de Rossel in the 1790s.