Life goes at its own pace 'island time' and while modern influences can be seen in the main centres, in some villages on the outer islands, age-old customs continue. Those hiking or exploring must be aware that Vanuatu has strict and sensitive land ownership regulations and permission should be sought before venturing onto private property.
Vanuatu is also a tax haven so there is much off-shore investment. Bislama, a Melanesian mixture of French and English, is the most widely used day-to-day language for the ni-Vanuatu people. There are more than local dialects and many ni-Vanuatu people speak four or more languages. Introducing Vanuatu. Plan your trip. Travel to Vanuatu Where to stay.
Before you go. Book your flights. The contributions of the two powers, as well as the nation's continued links with them, make it advantageous for Vanuatu to retain the two languages. There exists an unofficial separation line in modern day Vanuatu between the areas where French and English are used as mediums of instruction in schools.
Business in Vanuatu is primarily conducted in English, while French companies make use of both French and English. Bislama traces its history to the era of blackbirding, when populations of Pacific Islanders were forcefully transported to plantations in territories such as Fiji, Queensland, and Australia in the s and s.
A pidgin language subsequently emerged in these plantations, which featured English vocabulary as well as the grammatical structures of the region's language. The pidgin was adopted in Vanuatu upon the return of blackbirding survivors in the 20th century.
The pidgin enabled communication with European settlers and traders and also with native communities. It existed as a spoken language for many years, and the first dictionary in Bislama was released in Today, people of different ethnicities in Vanuatu resort to Bislama as a common medium of communication.
Other vowels in English are generally adapted to the nearest equivalent vowel in Bislama, so a word like 'burn' in English is pronounced as bon. Differences such as the vowels in 'kill' and 'keel' are not made in Bislama, and both of these words come out simply as kil , which means either 'injury' from 'kill' or 'keel'. The word for 'vegetable' in Bislama is therefore legim. In addition to these pure vowels, Bislama has a number of diphthongs, and the practice is to write these as ae corresponding to the sound in English 'eye' , oe as in 'boy' , ao as in 'cow'.
Nobody has really tried seriously to study the intonation pattern of Bislama, but it certainly seems to have a unique melody involving an unusual rise and fall of the voice while speaking.
Although there are plenty of differences of vocabulary and grammar between Bislama and both Pijin and Tok Pisin, one of the more immediately noticeable characteristics of Bislama is its distinctive intonation.
When you want to say that something or somebody is something else, there is no verb meaning "be" in Bislama, and the words describing the two things are simply placed one after the other, as in:. Yu hanggre. When the first part of the sentence is a noun or a pronoun other than mi or yu , the second part of the sentence will usually be separated from the first part by the small word i , as in:.
To indicate that an action is being performed, a verb follows a pronoun or a noun, with the word i coming between the two as described above. Mifala i ridim buk. However, if the first noun is plural rather than singular, the word i is replaced by oli , e. Ol studen oli ridim buk. Ol bos oli hanggre. Verbs in Bislama do not have endings to express meanings like present continuous or past tense in English. A verb can appear on its own, as in the examples just given, where it can have any tense depending on the context.
But if you need to indicate the tense, this can be done by placing a special "auxiliary" between the word i or oli and the verb. Other meanings can also be expressed by words of this kind, e. Tomson i stap ridim buk. Tomson i save kukum raes. Ol studen oli mas ridim buk. There are two exceptions. Firstly, the future tense is expressed by the form bae , which is not placed between i or oli and the verb at all, but it appears either before the word i or oli , or before at the beginning of the sentence, e.
Ol studen bae oli ridim buk. Secondly, if you want to indicate that something has already happened, you do this by placing finis after the verb, e. Tomson i hanggre finis. To make a statement negative in Bislama, all you have to do is put the word no between the word i or oli and the verb, e. Ol student oli no ridim buk. It is possible to place no before any of the other words that express tense or aspect except bai , as in:.
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