Mwotlap

Mwotlap, once recorded as Motlav, is an Oceanic language of the Austronesian family, belonging to the Torres–Banks linkage of northern Vanuatu. It is at home on Motalava in the Banks Islands, with communities on Ra and Vanua Lava. Volow, formerly spoken in eastern Motalava and long extinct, is sometimes counted as one of its dialects.

Like the other Torres–Banks languages it descends from the speech of the Lapita voyagers, who carried Austronesian languages into Remote Oceania and settled Vanuatu from about 1200 BCE. Centuries of isolation on small islands produced closely related but distinct island languages. Mwotlap was maintained through oral tradition, in genealogies, chants and storytelling, for the islands had no indigenous script.