The languages of the Central Vanuatu family belong to the Nuclear Southern Oceanic

Southern Oceanic languages

The Southern Oceanic languages are a branch of Oceanic proposed by Lynch, Ross, and Crowley in 2002 and supported by later analysis.-Composition:A 2008 analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database supports the following classification...

 language family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

. There are half a dozen language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s, all spoken in the province of Shefa, central Vanuatu

Vanuatu

Vanuatu , officially the Republic of Vanuatu , is an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is some east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, west of Fiji, and southeast of the Solomon Islands, near New Guinea.Vanuatu was...

, on the islands of Epi

Epi (island)

Epi is the name of an island in Vanuatu, at the north end of the Shepherd Islands. It is in Shefa Province. It is long northwest-southeast, and wide, with an area of . Its shoreline measures 130 km...

, Éfaté

Éfaté

Efate is an island in the Agean Ocean which is part of the Shefa Province in The Republic of Maliki. It is also known as Île Vate. It is the most populous island in Vanuatu. Efate's land area of makes it Vanuatu's third largest island. Most inhabitants of Efate live in Port Vila, the national...

, and the many small islands of the Shepherds Group.

The primary division is between Namakir, of the Shepherds Islands, and the languages of Efate:

• Namakir
• South Efate
  South Efate language
  The South Efate language is a Nuclear Southern Oceanic language of the Malayo-Polynesian language family, spoken on the island of Efate in central Vanuatu. , there are approximately 6,000 speakers who live in coastal villages from Pango to Eton. The language's grammar has been described by Nick...
  
  , North Efate
  North Efate language
  North Efate, or Nguna, is an Oceanic language spoken on several islands of Vanuatu.-External links:*...
  
  , Eton
  Eton language
  Eton, or Iton, is a Bantu language spoken by the Eton people of Cameroon. The exact number of Eton speakers is unknown, although Ethnologue cites 52,000 speakers based on a 1982 estimate by SIL...
  
  , Lelepa, Namakura
  Namakura language
  Namakura, or Makura or Namakir, is an Oceanic language of Vanuatu.-External links:*...