More than eighty Oceanic languages are spoken in the northern and central island of Vanuatu . This book provides the first detailed internal comparison of these languages. Several hundred cognate sets and reconstructed proto forms provide a basis for an account of the phonological history of fifteen selected languages. An argument is made for a unified origin of these languages from an ancestor not far removed from Proto Oceanic.

Ross Clark is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has carried out field research in Vanuatu on the languages of Efate and Espiritu Santo , and published descriptions of the Iomere language. His other research interests are in comparative Polynesian and Oceanic contact languages.