Avava currently falls into the category described in Lynch and Crowley (2001:14–19) as being among the most poorly documented of all languages in Vanuatu . Published documentation of this language by a linguist is restricted to two fairly short wordlists in Tryon (1976). In addition to this recent data, there is also a very small amount of published data on the Umbbuul variety of this language that can be extracted from Deacon (1934:125), which derives from his anthropological fieldwork in the area in 1926. This data, however, is restricted to just a small number of kin terms for each variety, with no other vocabulary having been recorded.

Avava is the primary language today of four villages in central Malakula: Tisvel, Khatbol, Taremp and Tembimbi. In contrast to the Naman and Tape languages of Malakula that I have worked on previously, Avava is an actively spoken language which continues to be passed on to present-day generations of children in all of these villages.

This is one of four monographs on Malakula languages that Terry Crowley had been working on at the time of his sudden death in January 2005. One of the four, Naman: a vanishing language of Malakula (Vanuatu) , had been submitted to Pacific Linguistics a couple of weeks earlier, and the remaining three were in various stages of completion, and John Lynch was asked by the Board of Pacific Linguistics to prepare all four for publication, both as a memorial to Terry and because of the valuable data they contain.