Northeast Vanuatu – Banks Islands languages

Southern Oceanic
Geographic distribution	Vanuatu, New Caledonia
Linguistic classification	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Central–Eastern Southern Oceanic
Subdivisions	Vanuatu (various branches) New Caledonia
Glottolog	None
Southern Oceanic

The Southern Oceanic languages are a linkage of Oceanic spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. It was proposed by Lynch, Ross, and Crowley in 2002 and supported by later analysis. They suspect that it is a linkage rather than a straightforward family.

Lynch (1995) tentatively grouped the languages as follows:

This organization is rather impressionistic. The non-nuclear branches are subsumed under the name Northern Vanuatu, but this is a residual group of languages with no defining features.

Clark (2009) has a slightly different structure for the northern and central languages:

North–Central Vanuatu

The Southern Vanuatu and New Caledonian languages were not addressed.