Neveʻei language
language
Neveʻei ([neveʔei]), also known as Vinmavis, is an Oceanic language of central Malekula, Vanuatu. There are around 500 primary speakers of Neveʻei and about 750 speakers in total.
Neveʻei was described for the first time by Jill Musgrave, in a monograph published in 2007: A grammar of Neveʻei, Vanuatu. This book is the source for the data and analyses below.
Name of the language
The traditional name of the language, which is recognized by older speakers, is Neveʻei. However, the majority of younger speakers of Neveʻei do not use the traditional name and some are not even aware of it. Native speakers commonly refer to their language as Nabusian teget which literally means “our language” and in Bislama the language (Neveʻei) is called Lanwis Vinmavis “the language of Vinmavis”. Neveʻei is the traditional name for the language; Vinmavis is the name of one of the villages in which the language is spoken in (Lynch and Crowley 2001:83).
Phonology
Phoneme inventory
Neveʻei contains 5 vowels and 20 consonants:
By comparison with other languages of the world, such a phoneme inventory classifies Neveʻei in the average range regarding vowels (5-6) as well as regarding consonants (22 ± 3). The consonant-vowel ratio classifies Neveʻei in the low band.
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This entry incorporates text from “Neveʻei language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.