The same language has also been known in the literature as Puma (or wrongly Buma), after the main village of Teanu island.

[3] The very first source about the languages of Vanikoro were wordlists collected in 1834 by French naturalist Joseph Paul Gaimard, as he took part in the first voyage of Astrolabe (1826–36) led by Dumont d'Urville.

On top of his botanical and zoological work, Gaimard collected, and later published, about ten pages of wordlists in Teanu, Tanema and Lovono.

More data was collected in the 1980s by Australian linguist Darrell Tryon;[5] he described Teanu using the name “Buma”.

[10] Teanu does not have a phonemic palatal glide /j/: the sound [j] only exists as an allophone of /i/ before another vowel: e.g. iebe [i.e.ᵐbe] ~ [je.ᵐbe] ‘besom, broom’.