An English-based creole that serves as the national language of Vanuatu — one of three official languages alongside English and French.
Where it’s spoken
Bislama developed in the 19th century from contact between English-speaking traders and labour recruiters and Vanuatu’s roughly 100 indigenous languages — making it the indispensable lingua franca of the archipelago. It is the everyday language for most ni-Vanuatu, even when each speaker has a different mother tongue. Roughly 200,000 speakers.
What it sounds like
Phonology simplified from English with the addition of vowel and consonant features from substrate Oceanic languages. Vocabulary is overwhelmingly from English (“yumi” = “you and me”; “hemi” = “he/she/it”) with grammar restructured along Melanesian lines.
How it’s written
The Latin alphabet with a phonemic spelling system standardised in the 1990s. Bislama is one of the official languages of the Vanuatu parliament; news broadcasts and government publications appear in it routinely.
Find more languages by letter
Bislama starts with B and ends with A. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Bislama":