Hiw is an Oceanic language spoken on Hiw island

Hiw Island

Hiw is the northernmost island in Vanuatu.-Geography:Hiw is the largest island in the Torres Islands in Torba Province. It is situated east of the Torres Trench, south of Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. It has an area of 51 km2...

, in the Torres islands

Torres Islands

The Torres Islands are in the Torba Province of Vanuatu, the northernmost island group in the country. The chain of islands that make up this micro-archipelago straddle the broader cultural boundary that distinguishes Island Melanesia from several Polynesian outliers located in the neighbouring...

 of Vanuatu

Vanuatu

Vanuatu , officially the Republic of Vanuatu , is an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is some east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, west of Fiji, and southeast of the Solomon Islands, near New Guinea.Vanuatu was...

.

It is distinct from Lo-Toga

Lo-Toga language

-Situation and dialects:Its 580 speakers live mostly in Lo and Toga, the two main islands in the southern half of the Torres group. The same language is also spoken by the small populations of the two other islands of Linua and Tegua....

, the other language of the Torres group.

Phonology

Hiw has 9 phonemic

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

 vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

s. These are all short monophthong

Monophthong

A monophthong is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation....

s /i ɪ e ɵ ə a ʉ o ɔ/.
Hiw is the only Austronesian language whose consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

 inventory includes a prestopped velar lateral approximant /g​͡ʟ/; this complex segment is the only liquid

Liquid consonant

In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:...

of the language.

External links

• Linguistic map of north Vanuatu, showing range of Hiw.