Bislama

E153026

Bislama is an English-based creole language widely spoken in Vanuatu and used as a key lingua franca across its many islands and communities.

All labels observed (1)

Label Occurrences
Bislama canonical 23

How this entity was disambiguated

Statements (47)

Predicate Object
instanceOf English-based creole
creole language
lingua franca
closelyRelatedTo Pijin (Solomon Islands)
Tok Pisin
coOfficialWith English
French
country Vanuatu
developedFrom 19th-century Pacific pidgin English
plantation pidgins in the South Pacific
hasAlternativeName Bichelamar
hasGlottocode bisl1239
hasGrammar relatively analytic structure
hasNativeSpeakers yes
hasSecondLanguageSpeakers yes
hasVocabularySource loanwords from French
loanwords from local Vanuatu languages
mostly English-derived lexicon
ISO639-1Code bi
ISO639-2Code bis
ISO639-3Code bis
languageFamily English creole
lexifierLanguage English
officialStatus national language of Vanuatu
one of the official languages of Vanuatu
primaryUse interethnic communication in Vanuatu
lingua franca across Vanuatu
region Oceania
regulates informal communication between different language groups in Vanuatu
spokenAsL1By urban ni-Vanuatu communities
spokenAsL2By majority of Vanuatu population
spokenBy many inhabitants of Vanuatu
status major language of wider communication in Vanuatu
substrateLanguage French
various Oceanic languages
timeDepth 19th century
typologicalFeature SVO word order
reduced inflectional morphology
use of long multiword prepositional phrases
use of preverbal tense-aspect-mood markers
usedIn Luganville
Port Vila
education in Vanuatu
media in Vanuatu
parliamentary debates in Vanuatu
urban areas of Vanuatu
writingSystem Latin alphabet
surface form: Latin script

How these facts were elicited

Referenced by (23)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.