Ura is a moribund language of the island Erromango in Vanuatu. It was thought to be extinct, after massive depopulation of the island in the nineteenth century, until Terry Crowley discovered a handful of elderly speakers in the 1990s.

Ura is a moribund language that is found in the Republic of Vanuatu, an archipelago of about 80 islands off of New Caledonia. The first inhabitants settled there around 4,000 years ago, and the population has grown about 2.3% per year according to a 1999–2009 census. Specifically, Ura is found on the southern island of Erromango, home to 1950 people (Daniel, 2010). The language originated just north of Elisabeth Bay and as far as Potnuma, eventually moving to other inland areas, including the large caldera (Crowley, 1999). According to Terry Crowley's count in the 1990s, it is spoken fluently by six people and semi-fluently by a couple of dozen others. All the speakers of the Ura language are multilingual. They speak Sye, which is the main language on the island, as well as Bislama, which is their pidgin English. Ura itself may have once been referred to as Aryau or Arau, words based on the language's first-person singular possessive pronoun. This naming system is characteristic of other Erromangan languages (Crowley, 1999).

Ura contains 18 consonant phonemes. One of the main differences between Ura and Sye is that /f/ and /v/ in Ura are contrasting consonants, while Sye contains no contrasting fricatives. /r/ is an apical alveolar flap or trill, and is sometimes confused with /l/, which is an alveolar lateral, even though there is a clear phonetic contrast. This may be due to a speaker's lack of articulation or because /r/ and /l/ are phonetically close phonemes (Crowley, 1999)

Diphthongs are present in Ura and can be seen in contrast to corresponding vowels. For example, /ne/ meaning 'water' compared to /nei/ meaning 'coconut', or /uvo/ meaning 'still' compared to /uyou/ meaning 'old woman' (Crowley, 1999).

In the Ura language, 88% of the words contain two to three syllables. Possible combinations of these phonological segments include: V, CV, VC, and CVC (where V = vowel and C = consonant). Ura's root-initial segments can contain up to two vowels in a row, with the first vowel being a non-high vowel (/e/, /o/, and /a/), and the second vowel being high (/i/ and /u/) to make the following combinations: /ei/, /eu/, /oi/, /ou/, /ai/, and /au/. /y/ and /w/ can be followed by any of the five syllables, with the exception of /wu/. In addition, most of the non-verbal roots begin with consonants, while most verbal roots begin with vowels, with the majority of these being high vowels. On the other hand, root-final segments exclude /v/, /f/, /h/, and /γ/ fricatives as well as consonant clusters from the root-final position. These rules are an example of how Ura is a more restricted language than Sye (Crowley, 1999).

Some Ura clauses have no verb constituents and take on the SO word order.

Nivan-yau

name-1SG