Ni-Vanuatu
Ni-Vanuatu is a large group of closely related Melanesian ethnic groups native to the island country of Vanuatu. As such, Ni-Vanuatu are a mixed ethnolinguistic group with a shared ethnogenesis that speak a multitude of languages. It is more frequently used than the demonym Vanuatuan, which is regarded as incorrect by some authors and style guides.
This recent coinage builds on the particle ni, which in some indigenous languages encodes the genitive, similar to the English 'of'. Thus Ni-Vanuatu literally means 'of Vanuatu'.
The term is mostly used in English and French, and is hardly used in Bislama, the country’s lingua franca, let alone in the indigenous languages of the archipelago.
Ni-Van is sometimes used as an abbreviation of Ni-Vanuatu. This term was pejorative in its original usage in the 1980s by Anglophone European expatriates, similar to its French equivalent les nis, but according to New Zealand linguist Terry Crowley by the 2000s the term Ni-Van saw increasing usage among Ni-Vanuatu.
