Kanakanavuis an insufficiently described and documented language, although there have been more publications on the language in recent years and there are more forthcoming publications in the near future.
The first written records are from the Dutch colonial period in the 17th century. In modern times, the most influential work on Kanakanavu is Shigeru Tsuchida’s publication from 1975 where he gave a lot of information on the ’Tsouic Languages’ including Kanakanavu. Sung (1966) wrote on The Kanakanavu phonology system, while Mei published an article on the Kanakanavu pronouns and verb inflection in 1982. More recently, Wu (2006) wrote on serial verb constructions in Kanakanavu, while Liu (2014) published on the aspect system. Another very important work is from Tsuchida (2003): he collected Kanakanavu stories in the 1960s and published them, together with an introduction in 2003.