Nume (also calledGog andTarasag), is an Oceanic language spoken onGaua island inVanuatu. Its 700 speakers live on the northeast coast of Gaua.^[1]

Nume is a distinct language from its immediate southern neighbors,Mwerlap andDorig.^[2]

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The nameNume originates in the name of a village, now abandoned.Tarasag is currently the community's main village. The alternate nameGog refers to the broader area, and by extension, to theisland.

Nume has 15 consonant phonemes.^[3]

• /β/ can also be heard as [ɸ] among speakers.

Nume has 7phonemic vowels, which are all shortmonophthongs.^[4]

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i⟨i⟩	u⟨u⟩
Near-close	ɪ⟨ē⟩	ʊ⟨ō⟩
Open-mid	ɛ⟨e⟩	ɔ⟨o⟩
Open	a⟨a⟩

The system ofpersonal pronouns in Nume contrastsclusivity, and distinguishes fournumbers (singular,dual,trial, plural).^[5]

Spatial reference in Nume is based on a system of geocentric (absolute) directionals, which is typical ofOceanic languages.^[6]

• François, Alexandre (2005a),"Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages"(PDF),Oceanic Linguistics,44 (2):443–504,doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0034,S2CID 131668754
• François, Alexandre (2011),"Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence"(PDF),Journal of Historical Linguistics,1 (2):175–246,doi:10.1075/jhl.1.2.03fra,hdl:1885/29283,S2CID 42217419.
• François, Alexandre (2012),"The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages"(PDF),International Journal of the Sociology of Language,214:85–110,doi:10.1515/ijsl-2012-0022,S2CID 145208588
• François, Alexandre (2015)."The ins and outs ofup anddown: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages"(PDF). In Alexandre François; Sébastien Lacrampe; Michael Franjieh; Stefan Schnell (eds.).The languages of Vanuatu: Unity and diversity. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. pp. 137–195.hdl:1885/14819.ISBN 978-1-922185-23-5.
• François, Alexandre (2016),"The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu"(PDF), in Pozdniakov, Konstantin (ed.),Comparatisme et reconstruction : tendances actuelles, Faits de Langues, vol. 47, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 25–60
• François, Alexandre (2022)."Presentation of the Nume language, and audio archive".Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS. Retrieved20 March 2023.

• Linguistic map of north Vanuatu, showing range of Nume on Gaua.
• Audio recordings in the Nume language, in open access, byA. François(source:Pangloss Collection).
• U Line Tatar Ve Vosog Le Ale Gavrund Simplified Anglican Morning and Evening Prayer in Nume (c. 1965), digitized by Richard Mammana.

• Languages of Vanuatu
• Banks–Torres languages
• Torba Province

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