Pacific Languages: An Introduction

The book has three major sections. Part 1 describes the geographical distribution of Pacific languages and attempts to summarize what is known of their history. Part 2 is an overview of the phonological and grammatical structure of these languages. This discussion is far from exhaustive. Many
areas (e.g., complex sentences) and many thorny problems (e.g., the Polynesian “passive”) are omitted or glossed over. But there is enough information to give a general picture of what Pacific languages are like, in what ways they are similar, and how they differ both from each other and from metropolitan languages like English or French. Part 3 looks at the relationship between Pacific societies and cultures and their languages from a number of different points of view. In the Pacific as elsewhere, language is very much a social and cultural phenomenon.