Paici

Paicî is a Kanak language of the Austronesian family spoken across the centre of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia. It belongs to the Central Northern group of the Northern New Caledonian languages. Paicî has relatively few consonants but a rich vowel system: ten oral vowels and seven nasal vowels, with distinctions of length and tone.

The language traces its roots to the Lapita voyagers who began raising coastal settlements on New Caledonia around 1100 BC, bringing an Austronesian tongue that diversified into the island's thirty Kanak languages.

James Cook sighted Grande Terre in 1774 and gave it the name New Caledonia, the Comte de Lapérouse surveyed its west coast in 1788, and English whalers charted the Loyalty Islands from 1793, but ships called only rarely for the next half century. Through these centuries Paicî stayed an unwritten language carried by oral custom.