Vanuatu

The Vanuatu group represents the Southern Oceanic linkage, a chain of Austronesian languages spread across the Vanuatu archipelago, New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands. The islands were first settled between about 1100 and 700 BCE by navigators of the Lapita culture, whose speech diversified as it spread from the Banks Islands in the north to Aneityum in the south and onward to New Caledonia. Vanuatu alone holds 138 indigenous languages, the highest linguistic density in the world, with around two dozen each on Espiritu Santo and Malakula; scholars distinguish North-Central Vanuatu, South Vanuatu and New Caledonian branches, and several of the languages show traces of older Papuan substrata.

The first recorded Europeans to arrive were the Spanish expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, which reached Espiritu Santo in 1606 and claimed the islands for Spain. James Cook followed in 1774, naming the archipelago the New Hebrides and, on the same voyage, giving New Caledonia its European name.