[2] Although Wuvulu-Aua has a grammatical structure, word order, and tenses which are similar to other Oceanic languages, it has an unusually complex morphology.
[3] Wuvulu Island, in the Manus Province of Papua New Guinea, is about 10 feet (3.0 m) above sea level.
[1] Wuvulu is most similar to Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, and other Oceanic languages surrounding the Admiralty Islands.
[6] Most researchers believe that the Proto-Eastern Malayo Polynesian (PEMP) language originated in the Bird's Head Peninsula of northwestern New Guinea.
PEMP developed different descendant languages; one was Proto-Oceanic (PO), which reached the northern coasts of New Guinea and Indonesia and Wuvulu.
[9] Wuvulu's five long-vowel phonemes have the same phonetic quality as their standard-vowel counterparts, but are longer in duration.
Three vowel pairs common in other languages do not exist in Wuvulu: eo, oe, and ae.
All dialects of Wuvulu-Aua claim that [k] is not a phone, since borrowed words from English replace [k] with ʔ.
[18] Verbs can be attached by subject and object clitics and can have added mood, aspect, and completion.
[19] Six adverbial morpheme prefixes describe verbs: complete, frequent, infrequent, eventual, intensified, and sequential.
[22] Wuvulu is one of the few languages with a similar structure for subject proclitics, previously thought to be exclusive to Proto-Oceanic (PO).
In this kind of sentence, a pause (【，】) separates the subject and predicate; an example is ia, futa ('He, (is a) chef').
It also tends towards verb–object–subject syntax, however, because of its similarity to Proto-Oceanic (where verbal-agreement marking and its propensity for the subject are at the end of the sentence).
When the suffix is combined with the fa- prefix, the meaning of the sentence can be changed to 'to cause/let something become [noun or adjective]'.
[27] "Preverbal morphemes within the Wuvulu verb phrase, consist of positions for subject clitics, and inflectional prefixes denoting mood/aspect and direction".
[28] Example: (SUBJECT=) (MOOD/ASPECT-) (DIRECTION-) VERB (-ADVERBIAL) (=OBJECT) (-DIRECTIONAL) The Oceanic language family tends to have preverbal morphemes which are free or prefixed.
Pre-verbal and post-verbal morphemes are bound in Wuvulu by the verb stem, however, except for subjects and objects (which can be free nominals, verbal clitics, or both).
[34] This is expressed by three forms essential to determine the position in space of the subject, a concept inherited from Proto-Oceanic.
The following table[37] has the glossed translations of each plural form, including the distance of each spatial deictic.
This distinction occurs in English with words like that or those, and Oceanic languages often have similar patterns of semantic organization.
Plural identifiers of demonstratives do not account for animation, which is limited to humans or spiritual beings (or deities) with personality.
Demonstratives in Wuvulu can be referents, surrounding a noun phrase (NP) as the focus of a sentence:[42] meni ramaʔa meni, na-lalai minoa 'this (particular) person married yesterday'[39] Demonstratives may also function as pronouns in NPs.
'[34] They can also be used after a verb with the third-person subject clitic ʔi (singular) or ro (plural): ʔi=na-no-mai fena 'That (thing) came.'
Below is an example of nei'a negating a verb: oma'oma'a fei tala ba ro-nei'a-we-no-'ua-mai 'Watch the road so that they do not just come [and surprise us].
'[51] Clausal and constituent negation are frequently used to express negative conditions, as seen twice below: ma naba lomi lagu-na-fi-siba-i lagu ei fi-tafi lomi i-ma-mara fei Haua 'And if they hadn't been cross (the two sisters), Haua wouldn't have been created.
'[52] Although the word lo’e appears to occur in free variation with lomi, Hafford wrote that this may require further research before it is confirmed.
[61] According to Hafford (1999), "These classifiers act as nouns ... taking quantifiers, articles and bound agreement suffixes.
[65] Genitalia take the general indirect possessum noun ape, contrary to other body parts which are considered directly possessed.
An example in Wuvulu is: Inatosiminia pafo pe'i fei agi'agi ei suta.
[74] People and locations addressed use proper nouns, with the morpheme o- added as a prefix to any name.