Tanema (Tetawo, Tetau) is a nearly extinct language of the island of

Vanikoro Vanikoro (sometimes wrongly named ''Vanikolo'') is an island in the Santa Cruz Islands, Santa Cruz group, located to the Southeast of the main Santa Cruz group. It is part of the Temotu Province of Solomon Islands. The name ''Vanikoro'' is alway ...

, in the easternmost province of the

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands, also known simply as the Solomons,John Prados, ''Islands of Destiny'', Dutton Caliber, 2012, p,20 and passim is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 1000 smaller islands in Melanesia, part of Oceania, t ...

Vitality

As of 2012, Tanema is only spoken by one speaker, Lainol Nalo.Homepage of the linguist A. François
(

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

). Like its neighbour Lovono, it has been replaced by Teanu, the main language of Vanikoro. The late Emele Mamuli was a prolific storyteller who could speak fluently the three languages of Vanikoro: Teanu, Lovono and Tanema.Photograph of Emele Mamuli
(2005). She was one of the last speakers of Tanema.

The language

Some information on the languages of Vanikoro, including Tanema, can be found in for the grammar, and François (2021) for the lexicon.See also François (2022) for a general presentation.

Notes

References

* * —— (2021)
''Online Teanu–English dictionary''
with lexical data in Lovono and Tanema. Paris, CNRS. *

External links

Audio recordings in the Tanema language
in open access, by A. François (source: ''

Pangloss Collection The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access ...

'' of

). Languages of the Solomon Islands Temotu languages Endangered Austronesian languages Critically endangered languages {{oceanic-lang-stub