Salawati is a string of closely-related Raja Ampat-South Halmahera (Austronesian) varieties, spoken by fewer than 3,400 people in villages around the coast and in the interior of Salawati island. There are six different Salawati varieties: Tepin, Wail, Fiat, Rajau, Butlih, and Kawit. Speakers of these six varieties originally lived in the interior of the island, but moved to the coast in the middle of the 20th century.

We don't know yet whether these six varieties are dialects of a single language (as suggested by the speakers), or whether they belong to two separate languages (as suggested in the literature). These varieties have been referred to collectively as 'Maden' in earlier literature, but speakers don't recognise this name. In fact, the speakers themselves don't have an indigenous collective name for these varieties.

The local context on Salawati island is highly multilingual: besides the Salawati varieties, other languages spoken on the island include the closely related Ma'ya [slz]; the less-closely related Biak [bhw]; and the completely unrelated language Seget [sbg]. More recently, migrants from further west in Indonesia have settled on Salawati, many of them speakers of Javanese. Unfortunately, this situation has put pressure on speakers of the Salawati varieties, and the language is now endangered in the villages I've visited: only adults use the language on a daily basis.