Bislama Alphabet & Phrases

Bislama is written in the Latin alphabet with a spelling that follows the sounds, not English. The spelling in Terry Crowley's Bislama dictionary uses 22 letters: A B D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y. There are no accented letters and no special characters, so a phone or computer set to English or French already has everything. The letters c, q, x and z are not part of the spelling of ordinary Bislama words; they turn up only in names and in English or French words written the foreign way.

Because words are spelled as they sound, many English words look new on paper: haos (house), taem (time), laef (life), jaj (judge), sip (ship), sapos (if, from suppose) and nambawan (number one, meaning the best). The letter j appears in jioj (church) and jaj (judge), while s is used for the sh sound in fis (fish).

Diphthongs are written with two vowels, ae, ao, ei and oe: kakae (food, to eat), bae (will, later; from by and by), naoia (now) and boe (boy). The pair ng is one sound, as in English singer, and is written ng in words such as long (in, at, to) and tangkyu (thank you). Each vowel has its own steady value, close to the vowels of Spanish or Italian, and there are no silent letters as in English.

How to type Bislama and its punctuation

Nothing special is needed to type Bislama: every letter is on a standard keyboard and on every phone. Punctuation follows English, with “double quotation marks” outside and ‘single ones’ inside; a phone usually turns the straight " and ' into the curly “ ” ‘ ’ by itself. If you need them on a computer, Windows Alt codes are Alt+0147 for “, Alt+0148 for ”, Alt+0145 for ‘ and Alt+0146 for ’; on a Mac they are Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ for the double pair, Option+] and Option+Shift+] for the single pair.

Bislama spelling is not fully standardized: older texts and some writers follow English or French habits, while dictionaries and the Bible translation provide reference conventions. For published text, a dictionary is a useful reference, but spellings still vary; follow one convention consistently to help readers and searches.

The vatu, Vanuatu's currency, has no Unicode sign of its own; prices are written with its abbreviation VT, as in 500 VT, and the vatu is not divided into cents.

Common Bislama phrases and how the grammar works

Everyday Bislama greetings are easy to copy: Halo! (hello), Gud moning (good morning), Olsem wanem? (how are things?), Mi oraet (I am fine), Tangkyu tumas (thank you very much), Lukim yu (see you) and Mi lavem yu (I love you). Welkam long Vanuatu greets visitors, and Hapi betdei wishes someone a happy birthday.

Most of the vocabulary comes from English, but the grammar is Melanesian. Blong marks belonging, as in haos blong mi (my house) and nem blong yu (your name). Ol before a noun makes it plural: ol pikinini, the children. Verbs that take an object usually end in -em, -im or -um: lukim (to see someone), ridim (to read something). Adjectives often carry -fala: bigfala haos, a big house.

Like the local languages of Vanuatu, Bislama has two words for we: yumi includes the person you speak to, mifala leaves them out. The national anthem is Yumi, Yumi, Yumi, and the national motto is Long God yumi stanap, In God we stand.

Where Bislama is spoken and where the name comes from

Bislama is spoken all over Vanuatu, the Y-shaped chain of islands in the southwest Pacific. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 290,000 speakers, close to the whole population: Vanuatu has more than a hundred local languages, and Bislama is the language islanders from different places share. For many families in Port Vila and Luganville it is now the first language. The constitution makes it the national language and, with English and French, one of the three official languages.

The name comes from bêche-de-mer, the French word for sea cucumber, which itself goes back to Portuguese bicho do mar. In the nineteenth century a pidgin English grew up in the sea cucumber and sandalwood trade and on the plantations of Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where many islanders were taken to work; the French name for that pidgin, bichelamar, survives in French today.

Bislama's closest relatives are Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Pijin in the Solomon Islands: all three grew from the same Pacific pidgin, and speakers can follow a good deal of each other's language (blong in Bislama is bilong in Tok Pisin). For the other languages of the country see English and French, and for the flag 🇻🇺, the volcano, kava and the rest of the country's emoji see Vanuatu.