Nisvai language

Nisvai
Nisvai
Vetbon
Native to	Vanuatu
Region	Malekula
Native speakers	(200 cited 2001)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic North-Central Vanuatu Central Vanuatu Malakula Malakula Interior Nisvai; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	nisv1234
ELP	Nisvai
	Nisvai is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Nisvai is an Oceanic language spoken in southeast Malekula, Vanuatu, on the eastern tip of the island, by about 200 speakers.^[2]^[1]

The languages surrounding Nisvai include, or used to include, Port Sandwich, Nasvang, Sörsörian, Axamb and Avok.^[2]

Name

The name Nisvai literally means "what".

1 2 Lynch, John & Terry Crowley. 2001. Languages of Vanuatu: A new survey and bibliography. Canberra: Australian National University.
1 2 Charpentier, Jean-Michel (1982). Atlas linguistique du Sud - Malekula—Linguistic Atlas of South Malekula (Vanuatu). Paris: Centre National de la Recherche.

Nisvai DoReCo corpus compiled by Jocelyn Aznar. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.