Kei

Kei, called Veveu Evav by its speakers, is an Austronesian language of the Kei Islands in the southeastern Moluccas. It belongs to the Kei–Fordata branch of the Kei–Tanimbar group. Kei is the archipelago's lingua franca, used alongside Kur and the Banda speech brought by refugees from the Banda Islands after the Dutch conquest of 1621.

Each island and village has its own dialect; the Kei Kecil dialect carries the most prestige. Customary order rests on rat, or rajas, and Larvul Ngabal, which local tradition traces to princess Dit Sakmas and ancestors said to have come from Bali in the fourteenth-century heyday of Majapahit.

Kei had no indigenous writing tradition; Dutch Catholic missionaries first recorded it in a Roman-based orthography. Kei is often said to derive from the Portuguese word kayos, stone, after the rocky atolls navigators encountered in the sixteenth century.