Vanuatu's culture: 113 languages, one creole and customs kept island by island

Why so many languages are spoken

Wikipedia counts 113 indigenous languages still actively spoken, all of them Oceanic languages of the Austronesian family, three of them Polynesian outliers in the south and the rest Southern Oceanic. Britannica gives more than 100 languages and dialects. Among some 300,000 people that comes to about 2,000 speakers a language. The reasons Wikipedia gives are the land and the history: repeated waves of migration, communities that were small, self-sufficient and hostile to one another without any of them dominating the rest, and steep islands that made travel hard even within one island.

The constitution names Bislama the national language and makes Bislama, English and French the official languages, with English and French as the principal languages of education. It also commits the republic to protect the local languages as part of the national heritage. Those languages are losing ground to Bislama: the share of the population using an indigenous language fell from 73.1% to 63.2% between 1999 and 2009, by Wikipedia's figures.

Schooling still follows the condominium. Britannica records that French aid has kept a French-language school system running beside the English one since independence, so that about half of ni-Vanuatu children are taught in French. The University of the South Pacific opened its Emalus Campus in Port Vila in 1989, and the university's law school is there.

How Bislama grew out of the plantations

The name comes through the nineteenth-century word Beach-la-Mar from bêche de mer, the sea cucumber that traders gathered and dried alongside sandalwood in the 1840s. The language itself formed on the plantations of Queensland and Fiji, where islanders recruited during the blackbirding years of the 1870s and 1880s needed a common speech. The same plantation pidgin is the ancestor of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Pijin in Solomon Islands. It spread through the archipelago at the turn of the twentieth century as the workers came home, and it gave islanders a way to talk to one another as well as to traders and settlers.

More than 95% of Bislama words come from English and a few dozen from French, while its grammar and sounds are those of the Oceanic languages around it. Two short words do most of the work English gives to prepositions: long for at, in, to or beside, and blong for of or belonging to, so buk blong mi is my book and man blong Amerika an American. Verbs do not change; small markers carry tense, as in mi stap kakae taro, I am eating taro, and bae mi kakae taro, I will eat taro. The pronouns distinguish one, two, three and many, and whether a first-person plural includes the listener.

Bislama was mostly spoken rather than written until its first dictionary in 1977. A new dictionary in 1995 and its second edition in 2004 settled a standard spelling. On Pentecost some people write it in avoiuli, a script whose letters derive from sand drawing. The words of the national anthem, "Yumi, Yumi, Yumi", are in Bislama. The language is the first language of many people in Port Vila and Luganville and a second language for most of the rest of the country.

What kastom means in village life

Most ni-Vanuatu live in small villages where life turns on the land, and Britannica describes identification with a particular piece of land, expressed in Bislama as man ples, as one of the foundations of the culture. Land is more than an economic resource: it ties the living to their ancestors, whose bones are often buried close by. Among most rural people, Britannica writes, kastom and Christianity together guide daily life.

On many islands men gather each evening in the nakamal, the men's house, to drink kava. Britannica describes the nakamal as a place where men also seek to communicate with ancestral spirits, using magic stones to reach a spiritual world they see as present everywhere. Villages keep separate spaces for men and women, and the nakamal itself sets aside space for women during menstruation.

The country divides into three broad cultural regions. In the north rank is won through grade-taking, where a man's standing depends on how much he can give away, and pigs, particularly those with rounded tusks, count as wealth throughout the islands. In the centre older Melanesian systems prevail, and in the south chiefs hold titles granted with privileges attached. Young men pass through initiation, usually including circumcision. Grade-taking ceremonies were bound up with the old religion and with the passing on of mana, potency, alongside tabu and the cult of ancestral spirits called tamate.

What the sand drawings record

UNESCO proclaimed Vanuatu's sand drawing a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage in 2003 and inscribed it on the Representative List in 2008. The drawer works directly on the ground, in sand, volcanic ash or clay, and with one finger traces a single continuous meandering line over an imagined grid, producing an often symmetrical pattern. The tradition developed as a way for members of some 80 language groups in the central and northern islands to communicate with one another.

A drawing does more than decorate. UNESCO describes the drawings as memory aids that carry rituals, myths and local history, kinship systems, song cycles, farming methods, architectural and craft designs and the patterns of dances. Most have several layers of meaning and can be read as art, as a store of information, as the illustration to a story or as a signature or message. A master drawer has to know the meaning of each pattern as well as its form and be able to explain it to those watching. UNESCO's description warns that showing the drawings to tourists as decorative folklore risks stripping them of that deeper meaning.

Why men dive from towers on Pentecost

In the south of Pentecost men jump from wooden towers 20 to 30 metres high with two vines tied to their ankles. The Sa language calls both the tower and the dive gol; in Bislama it is nanggol. The dive belongs to the yam harvest and takes place in April, May or June, when the vines are at their most elastic and the dry season makes building easier. A good dive, in which the diver's shoulders brush the ground, is held to bring a good harvest.

Building a tower takes two to five weeks and twenty to thirty men. A lopped tree forms its core, a scaffold of poles lashed with vines holds it steady, and platforms project from the front at different heights, built to snap and absorb some of the force of the fall. A village elder chooses each diver's vines and matches them to his weight. Ten to twenty men jump in a village, the least experienced from the lowest platforms. For a boy, circumcised at about seven or eight, the first dive is the passage to manhood; his mother holds a favourite childhood object during the jump and throws it away afterwards.

Missionaries persuaded villagers to give up the dive in the nineteenth century, and Christian villagers from neighbouring areas revived it after independence in 1980 as a mark of identity. Its history with outsiders has been uneasy. In 1974 a dive was staged for Queen Elizabeth II in the wet season, when the vines lacked elasticity, and a diver whose vines both broke died of his injuries. In 1995 the people of Pentecost declared they would seek royalties from bungee-jumping companies, and in 2006 the Vanuatu Cultural Centre banned commercial filming of the ritual. The chiefs formed a tourism council to manage visitors, and the national tourism office lists dives every Saturday from 4 April to 27 June 2026 at Ratap.

Which churches and movements people follow

Christianity is the religion of most ni-Vanuatu. Britannica puts Protestants at about seven-tenths of the population, Presbyterians the most numerous among them. Wikipedia gives the Presbyterian Church about a third of the population and the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches about 15% each. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported 3.6% of the population as members in 2022, and Wikipedia gives 1.4% for the Baháʼí Faith in 2010 and about 200 Muslim converts in 2007. Missionaries once called the old religion a time of darkness, taem blong tudak in Bislama, but much of it survives beside the churches, especially in rural areas. The Anglican missionary Robert Codrington described it in The Melanesians in 1891. Its named figures include Qat and Qasavara in the Banks Islands, Tagaro on Ambae and Lisepsep across the archipelago, and on Aneityum people worshipped spirits called natmasses, represented in stones. Islam arrived through Hussein Nabanga, who converted while training as a Christian missionary.

The Second World War left movements of its own. On Tanna the John Frum movement, centred on Lamakara and Sulphur Bay, holds that a messenger named John Frum foretold the arrival of wealth with the Americans, and it has had members in parliament. Also on Tanna, villagers of Yaohnanen came to revere Prince Philip as the son of a mountain spirit of their tradition who crossed the sea to marry a powerful woman.

What people eat and listen to

Food comes mostly from the garden and the sea. The cuisine, aelan kakae or island food, is built on fish and on root crops such as taro and yams, with papaya, pineapple, mango, plantain and sweet potato through much of the year, flavoured with coconut milk and cream. Most food is cooked on hot stones, boiled or steamed, and very little is fried. Laplap is counted the national dish.

Traditional music, kastom singsing, is still played across the rural islands, mostly on idiophones: drums, rattles and the large carved slit gongs that have become a symbol of Vanuatu. The gongs stand upright only in the centre of the archipelago, mainly on Ambrym, and Britannica illustrates the dances of spirit impersonation performed there in masks and cloaks of dried banana leaves. String bands with guitars, ukuleles and a bush bass spread to every island after the Second World War, and a commercial music industry grew in the 1990s, with zouk and reggaeton among the genres played in town. The tourism office's calendar sets kastom ceremonies such as the Rom dances of Ambrym and the land dive beside music festivals such as Fest'Napuan and the Fête de la Musique, and notes that Port Vila has the densest public programme while events on the outer islands follow the village seasons.

Football is widely played, and the top division is the VFF National Super League. Cricket has about 8,000 registered players, while volleyball is considered a girls' sport. The poet Grace Mera Molisa, who died in 2002, was known abroad for her verse and for her work for women's rights, and the artist Aloi Pilioko made the coloured relief on the post office in Port Vila.