Oceanic Linguistics, Volume 47, no.2 (December 2008) © by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. Squib The Language of Lapita: Vanuatu and an Early Papuan Presence in the Pacific Mark Donohue and Tim Denham AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY AND MONASH UNIVERSITY The languages of Vanuatu are uniformly Austronesian, but have long been described as “aberrant.” Blust (2005) points out a number of morphosyntactic fea- tures of the Vanuatu languages that might provide evidence for a Papuan element in their history. We add to that argument, presenting phonological evidence that links the languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia with the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea. Accepting that the earliest archaeological sites in Va- nuatu are Lapita sites, we suggest that this implicates non-Austronesian speaking Melanesians in the earliest occupancy of the islands, calling into question assump- tions that the Lapita expansion in the Paci fic can be unproblematically associated with the expansion of Austronesian languages of the Oceanic subgroup. 1. THE QUESTION OF VANUATU. 1 Unlike the Solomons, where four non-Aus- tronesian languages can still be found, or the offshore islands of Papua New Guinea, where a couple of dozen non-Austronesian languages survive, the linguistic landscape in Vanuatu is uniformly Austronesian. Further, and in contrast to the Solomons and regions to the west, there was no human settlement in Vanuatu prior to the earliest Lapita horizons (Bedford 2006), an event that has also been associated with the spread of Austronesian languages into the Paci fi c (e.g., Pawley and Green 1973; Pawley and Ross 1993; Ross, Pawley, and Osmond 1998; Summerhayes 2001; Lynch, Ross, and Crowley 2002; Bedford, Sand, and Connaughton 2007; and many more). On the other hand, a number of traits in the Austrone- sian languages of Vanuatu are not what would be expected of an Oceanic language. Ray (1926), Capell (1954), Lynch (1981), and Wurm (1982) raised the possibility of there having been a Papuan presence underlying some of the language structures found in Vanuatu, noticing that many of the grammatical features of the Austronesian languages spoken there did not “ fit” with the picture presented by other Austronesian languages of the Paci fic. For instance, Capell (1950:99) sums up the situation as follows: “All the Mel- 1. This paper has benefited greatly from discussions with our colleagues. In particular, thanks are due to Robert Blust, who not only started the authors thinking about these questions but also provided impor- tant feedback on an earlier version of this paper; to Andy Pawley for an extensive discussion on the tying together of linguistics and archaeology in the Pacific; to Malcolm Ross for sharing opinions on developments in Oceanic; to Frank Lichtenberk for commentary that made us pull this article above the level of a short report; and to John Lynch for picking up on several infelicities we committed, help- ing us over others, as well as sharing his knowledge of the languages of Vanuatu and providing many leads. The viewpoint that we espouse here does not necessarily represent the views of these people.