Lavongai

Lavongai, also called Tungag after its principal village area, is an Austronesian language spoken on New Hanover Island, known to its people as Lavongai, and neighbouring islets off New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago. It keeps singular, dual, trial and plural pronouns, with separate forms showing whether the listener is included, and marks possession by suffixes on nouns. Its dialects fall into a south-coast group and a western and northern group.

The islanders live by subsistence farming and fishing. Lapita seafarers settled the region about three thousand years ago, and Dutch sailors Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten made the first European landfall in the New Ireland chain in 1616.