Vanuatu

The archipelago now called Vanuatu sits in the southwestern Pacific, a scatter of eighty islands between Fiji and New Caledonia. British and French sailors knew these islands as the New Hebrides, a name James Cook gave them in 1774 after the Scottish islands he found similarly rugged. That colonial label held for two centuries, long after the people living there had their own words for home.

The name Vanuatu comes from the indigenous Melanesian languages of the archipelago itself. The element vanu means land or place in several of those languages, and atu carries the sense of stand or be permanent. Together they form something close to Land Eternal or the Land That Stands: a declaration rooted in the ground beneath the islanders' feet, not in a navigator's nostalgia.

The independence movement of the 1970s consciously reached for this indigenous name as a mark of self-determination. Walter Lini, who became the first prime minister when independence came on July 30, 1980, and his colleagues in the Vanua'aku Pati made renaming part of the political program. The new name was not invented; it was recovered from languages that had been speaking it all along.

Bislama, the English-based creole that is Vanuatu's lingua franca alongside French and English, carries vanu forward in everyday speech. Today's Vanuatu is home to roughly 320,000 people speaking over 100 indigenous languages, making it one of the most linguistically dense places on earth per capita. The word that replaced the colonial name holds all of that inside four syllables.