[3] Araki belongs to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian languages, more specifically the Espiritu Santo group.

The rest of the island's population have a passive knowledge of Araki, meaning they understand it but have limited ability to speak it.

A large portion of the Araki vocabulary, as well as idiosyncratic syntactic and phonetic phenomena of the language have been lost.

The pidgin Bislama is also spoken by many speakers of Araki as the country's lingua franca (although it is rarely used in rural areas).

Diachronic effects of word stress have led to the irregular loss of some syllables, and the creation of the new phonotactic patterns of CVC and CCV, with many word-final consonants, though not as pervasive compared to the Torres–Banks languages.

A process of final high vowel deletion (which is common in Vanuatu languages) does not affect the stress rule.

[7] The new orthography is indicated here: The older orthography used ⟨c⟩ for t͡ʃ, ⟨d⟩ for ɾ, ⟨r⟩ for r, and ⟨g⟩ for ŋ. Araki syntax can be divided into an open set of lexemes, including nouns, adjectives, verbs, adjuncts, adverbs, numerals and demonstratives, and a closed set of morphemes, which are often monosyllabic clitics or affixes.

Nouns differ from verbs in being directly predicative, which means that they do not have to be preceded by a subject clitic.

Also, only nouns are able to refer directly to entities of the world, and make them arguments entering into larger sentence structures.

Moreover, not only is there no gender-distinction, but even number is most of the time under-specified; only the context, and partly the personal marker on the verb, help distinguish between singular and plural reference.

These are the clitics va, ri, mara, rai, r̄e, mo hese, which appear as shown in the above list.

va is placed immediately before the noun, and codes for discourse-internal anaphora (that is, reference to a term that has already been introduced in the earlier context).

Its role is to refer to a set of human individuals defined by the next word, in a similar way to English 'one' in the small one(s).

The specific indefinite mo hese, a numeral quantifier meaning 'one', is very commonly, if not obligatorily, used when a referent is introduced for the first time into the discourse.

mo hese may be used as a numerical predicate, contrasting with other numbers, but it is most frequently used as a kind of article following the NP in order to mark it as being indefinite, that is, newly introduced into the discourse.

Although this semantic difference is not grammaticalized in English, it is in Araki, using re as a marker for non-specific indefinite reference.

The function of the aforementioned reference-tracking devices can be summarized as follows: Verbs are predicative words, which are preceded by subject clitics.

Under certain conditions, a noun can also be the head of a so-called 'VP', provided that it is endowed with mood-aspectual properties, such as negation.

Some verbs in Araki allow its syntactic subject to be marked with either the case role of patient or agent.

The following table shows the clitics that provide ordinary marking of subjects in verbal sentences.

Numerals behave syntactically like (intransitive) verbs, and could be argued to form a subset of verbal lexemes.

The category of adverbs includes all words which form directly (that is, without a preposition) an oblique complement.

V̈apacaveriANAmo3:Rr̄ohostayr̄oIPFVsaha-niup-therekaur̄a.aboveV̈apa ri mo r̄oho r̄o saha-ni kaur̄a.cave ANA 3:R stay IPFV up-there above'The cave is located up there, above'.Demonstratives are associated either to nouns for reference tracking, or have the whole clause as their scope.

Although they syntactically behave partially like locational adverbs, demonstrative words form a specific paradigm, which is easily identified morphologically.

Araki uses reduplication in order to present a notion as intense, multiple or plural in one way or another.

Semantically, verbal reduplication triggers features such as non-referentiality/genericity of the object, and thus is generally associated with noun incorporation.

The most frequent coordinator is pani ~ pan 'and, but', which usually carries an adversive meaning: Jam1inc:RjeNEGlevseknowlesi-a,see-OBJ:3sgpanibutnia3sgmo3:Rr̄ohostayr̄o.IPFVJam je levse lesi-a, pani nia mo r̄oho r̄o.1inc:R NEG know see-OBJ:3sg but 3sg 3:R stay IPFV'We are not able to see him [ghost], yet he is around'.The word for 'or' is voni ~ von ~ vo.

'Notice the ambiguity of the sentence: it is only the context that makes clear that what falls down is actually the stone, not the man.

The high frequency of clause chaining constructions makes the clitic mo (third person realis, singular or plural) by far the most frequent word encountered in actual discourse.

Clause chaining can be used to describe a wide variety of situations: In June 2008, the Jacques Chirac Foundation for Sustainable Development and Cultural Dialogue announced its intention to focus on preserving the Araki language.