LAMALANGA is situated on the north-west coast of the island called Raga, or Araga (Pentecost Island), in the central New Hebrides, Melanesia.

The head station of the Melanesian Mission on Raga is at Lamalanga which itself is on the coast; but the people who speak the language represented in this grammar live on the hills just above the Mission Station. Dr. R. H. Codrington published a grammar of the language spoken at Vun Marama on the same coast, a few miles north of Lamalanga.

The Melanesian and non-MN languages alike belong to the group known as agglutinating, i.e. they are able to form compound words out of a number of elements, many of which are incapable of independent existence. In this they are not entirely different from the MN languages to the east of them, and yet there is a difference, and that not merely of degree but of kind. Prefixes and suffixes play their parts in these languages, as they do in SEP, but the power of adding indefinitely suffix to suffix is much more limited in insular MN than in SEP. Such a compound word as Suau ‘ita-komakomani-uyo-i-miu, take care of yourselves again, is hardly to be thought of, say, in Mota, Fiji, or Samoa.