Bislama is the national language and lingua franca in Vanuatu. Most of the nation’s c. 260,000 residents can use the language and increasing numbers of people speak it as their home language (either as L1 or co-L1 with a vernacular). This is particularly common in the main towns, but families using Bislama amongst themselves are found in many smaller villages too. It is not formally used as a medium of education but is widely used in public life and government. There are some suggestions that different regional dialects of Bislama are stabilising in the country: the data represented in APiCS (default lect) is largely based on fieldwork recording spontaneous speech among friends in the northern region (Sanma Province) in the mid-1990s, supplemented with printed materials in the newspapers (mainly the now defunct Vanuatu Hebdomadaire Weekly) and some national radio broadcasts in 1998 and isolated examples from print or native speaker intuitions collected between 1998-2010.