notes

* Bislama. A fascinating pidgin-English which is the lingua franca of Vanuatu, and one of the three official languages, along with English and French.
Bislama contains about 95% of words derived from English, with the other 5% made up of French and native language words, with a phonetic spelling and loose grammatical structure
Vanuatu has hundreds of local languages; in days gone past people of one side of an island spoke a different language which was unintelligible to the folk on the other side of the island.
These native languages are now endangered, with many having less than 100 speakers, and will die out over time.
However, Bislama allows anyone from any island in Vanuatu to communicate with each other.
English is widely spoken on the island of Éfaté, however French is the dominant other language spoken on the islands of Espiritu Santo and Pentecost.

** ni-Vanuatu is the Bislama word for a Melanesian inhabitant of Vanuatu. It is used as both the singular and plural.

*** Vatu [abbreviated as vt] is the currency of Vanuatu, at the time of visiting 100vt = approx. $A1.15

† Jeremy MacClancy, To Kill a Bird with Two Stones - A Short History of Vanuatu, [Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Port Vila, 2002], 159pp.