Drehu

Drehu, whose speakers call it qene drehu and which was long known to outsiders as Dehu or Lifou, is a Kanak language of the Loyalty Islands subgroup of Oceanic Austronesian, spoken chiefly on Lifou Island east of Grande Terre.

Its ancestors were the Lapita seafarers who carried Proto-Oceanic through Island Melanesia from about 1600 BCE and reached the Loyalty Islands in the course of that expansion. Drehu was traditionally an oral language, and alongside ordinary speech it possessed a separate honorific register called qene miny, reserved for addressing a chief.