Sakao

Sakao, also called Nkep or Nekep, is an Oceanic language spoken on the northeastern horn of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, around Port-Olry and Hog Harbour. Foreigners and linguists named it after the offshore island of Sakao, which its speakers call Ladhi. It has two dialects, the northern Port-Olry dialect and the more conservative southern Hog-Harbour dialect.

Although closely related to Tolomako, Sakao has undergone such drastic sound change, probably within the last thousand years, that the two are mutually unintelligible: Sakao permits unusual consonant clusters and builds long polysynthetic words.

The Spanish expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Quiros made the first recorded European landfall on Espiritu Santo in 1606, and Louis de Bougainville and James Cook revisited the island in 1768 and 1774.