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 group, located to the Southeast of the main Santa Cruz group. It is part of the Temotu Province of the Solomon Islands. The name ''Vanikoro'' is always used as thou ...

, in the easternmost province of the

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its ca ...

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 (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

).“The Mystery of the Sinking South Pacific Islands” — Part 2: A Language's Lone Survivor
(article in Der Spiegel, 15/06/2012). It has been replaced by Teanu, the main language of Vanikoro.

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 Lovono (''Vano'', ''Alavano'', ''Alavana'') is a nearly extinct language of the island of Vanikoro in the easternmost province of the Solomon Islands. As of 2012, it is only spoken by four speakers;Audio recordings in the Tanema language
in open access, by A. François (source: '' Pangloss Collection'' of

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