Ni-Vanuatu

Ni-Vanuatu is a demonym used to refer to all Melanesian ethnicities originating in Vanuatu. It also refers, more generally, to nationals and citizens of Vanuatu, whatever their ethnicity.

This recent coinage builds on the particle ni, which in some indigenous languages encodes the genitive, similar to the English ‘of’. Thus Ni-Vanuatu literally means ‘of Vanuatu’.