Melanesian Mission Place Names on Norfolk Island

Melanesian Mission,founded by the Anglican Church in New Zealand to evangelise the peoples of Island Melanesia, was headquartered in the southwestern region of Norfolk Island from 1867 to 1920 (Figure 1). Students came to this small island more than seventeen hundred kilometres from Sydney and over one thousand kilometres from Auckland from various language groups in what are now the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. This paper investigates the possible influence of the mission's lingua franca,Mota (an indigenous language from the Banks Islands in what is today Vanuatu), and any other Melanesian languages spoken at the mission on Norfolk Island's linguistic landscape.