Vanuatu holds the islands together with a language that arose there

On the map Vanuatu looks like an open Y in the South Pacific. The islands do not touch. What makes them a state is Bislama, a language neither Britain nor France brought with them, formed on the islands between the two administrations.

Port Vila stands on Efate, on the southern arm of that arc, not on the large island to the north and not in a centre the country does not have. 335,169 people live on 12,189 square kilometres of land. Between the islands is sea, and the sea is absent from the area figure. The state has no land border. It has harbours, airstrips and a language for the distance in between.

A language between two administrations

The New Hebrides were not an ordinary colony with a single flag. Britain and France ran the same islands side by side, each with its own courts, its own schools and its own police. A child in the British school learned English. A child in the French school learned French. Between the counters, people needed a speech that neither governor could claim as his property. Bislama grew out of that daily life, a contact language with an English base, French scraps and Oceanic words.

Independence in 1980 did not tidy this up by striking out one of the colonial languages. The constitution makes Bislama the national language and leaves English and French beside it as official languages. Many indigenous languages are spoken as well, changing from coast to coast. They are why a shared speech was needed at all. Bislama does not replace them in the village. It is the language in which an office in Port Vila and a market on an outer island can mean the same state.

Port Vila governs an arc

Efate is not the middle of the country. Espiritu Santo, to the north, carries Luganville and a long harbour. Tanna, to the south, lives with the volcano Yasur, whose ash belongs to the ordinary life of the island. To govern from Port Vila is to govern across water. A road ends in the surf. A decision taken in the capital reaches an outer island by ship or by plane, or it reaches it late. That is the normal shape of this state, not an exception for remote posts.

That is why the counted land area misleads. It adds up dry ground and leaves out the distances that actually make the state. People live on coastal strips, in gardens and in a capital that pulls harbour and administration together. Port Vila is the capital because the ships berth there and the offices stand there, not because Efate is the balance point of the arc. The balance point is the water.

Bislama is not a courtesy toward the colonial period. It is the language without which the island arc would have no shared conversation.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

The vatu belongs to the islands

The currency is the vatu, issued by the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu. It is not a franc and it is not a pound. That is the same decision as with the language, moved into the treasury: the state that left the condominium in 1980 was not meant to go on living in the money of either former power. On an island state with little land, this is not a symbolic question at the margin. Whoever sets the currency sets the price of copra, of the market and of a wage on the dock.

Foreign money still arrives in Port Vila, through ships, aid offices and visitors. Villages on the outer islands keep another tempo, with gardens, boats and kinship that runs across several islands. Bislama is heard in both tempos, in the ministry and in the market. Tell Vanuatu as a South Sea picture and you see the coast, not the constitution. The state came out of a dual colonial administration and gave itself a language and a coin of its own, because otherwise the islands would only have lain side by side.

On the school map Vanuatu is an arc. Inside, it is a speech community with a harbour capital. Port Vila holds the offices. Bislama holds the islands in conversation. The vatu says that neither still belongs to London or to Paris.