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Tangoa
Mara Tatagoa
Region	Tangoa Island, Vanuatu
Native speakers	800 (2001)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic North-Central Vanuatu North Vanuatu Espiritu Santo Tangoa
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tgp
Glottolog	tang1347
ELP	Tangoa
Tangoa is not endangered according to the classification system of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Tangoa, or Leon Tatagoa, is an Oceanic language or dialect spoken on Tangoa Island, south of Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu. The community was an early settlement for Christian missionaries, leading to its use as a lingua franca in the area, having largely displaced the moribund Araki language spoken on Araki Island.

Classification

Tangoa is generally described as a language, but also as a dialect of the proposed, lexicostastically defined Southwest Santo language along with Araki, Akei, and Wailapa.

Name

The name Tangoa is an endonym. In neighboring Araki, it is known as R̄ango.

Characteristics

Tangoa is one of the few in the world possessing a set of linguolabial consonants.

References

1. Tangoa at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. ^ "Tangoa | Ethnologue Free". Ethnologue (Free All). Retrieved 2025-01-01.
3. ^ "Glottolog 5.1 - Movono". glottolog.org. Retrieved 2025-01-01.
4. ^ Lynch, John; Crowley, Terry (2001). Languages of Vanuatu: A New Survey and Bibliography. pp. 51–52. Archived from the original on 19 July 2024.
5. Vari-Bogiri, Hannah (2008). "A Sociolinguistic Survey of Araki: A Dying Language of Vanuatu". Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 26 (1). doi:10.1080/14790710508668398.
6. Lynch, John (2019). "The Bilabial-to-Linguolabial Shift in Southern Oceanic: A Subgrouping Diagnostic?". Oceanic Linguistics. 58 (2): 292–323. doi:10.1353/ol.2019.0010. ISSN 0029-8115. JSTOR 26905160.
7. See entry R̄ango in the dictionary of Araki.

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