The Norfolk Island people speak their own language. Developed on Pitcairn Island after the mutiny on the Bounty to enable the English seamen and their Tahitian spouses to communicate, the language not surprisingly developed a unique melding of 18th-century Highlands English and Tahitian that can still be heard on Norfolk and Pitcairn Islands today.
It is a beautiful and colourful language, we think, when spoken properly. Singsong is how it was often referred to by visiting naval captains of yore.
The language, historically, has been written in an English form with many different versions of spelling. What was missing, for those not already fluent in the idiom, was that special Island inflection and accent not readily captured in conventional English spelling. Alice Buffett, a Norfolk Islander, has successfully developed an orthography that now provides a way of writing the language.
Students at the Norfolk Island Central School have also developed a web page with downloadable audio files to enable you to hear the language being spoken.