Tanema (Tetawo, Tetau) is a nearly extinct language of the island of Vanikoro, 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 31,637 ...

).“The Mystery of the Sinking South Pacific Islands” — Part 2: A Language's Lone Survivor
(article in

Der Spiegel ''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...

, 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 It has been replaced by Teanu, the main language of Vanikoro.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 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 {{oceanic-lang-stub