Mu Ngava

Mu Ngava, recorded by linguists as Rennellese or Rennell-Bellona, is a Polynesian outlier language spoken on Rennell and Bellona, two small islands south of the main Solomon Islands chain and well outside the Polynesian Triangle.

The islands were first occupied by Lapita peoples, with further waves of settlement around the second century BC and about AD 1000; the population descends from Polynesians who arrived from Uvea, now Wallis Island, before 1400, and oral tradition recalls the voyage of an ancestor named Kaitu'u around that time.

Captain Butler of HMS Walpole became the first European to sight the islands in 1801. The language keeps a five-vowel system, favours open consonant-vowel syllables, and traditionally orders words verb-subject-object, with reduplication used to form plurals and new terms.