This paper surveys the literature regarding the linguistic subgrouping and historical affiliations of languages within the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. It provides an overview of the evidence for the Oceanic subgroup and its external affiliations, as well as an overview of the internal relationships between languages of the family. It explores questions that have been settled to the satisfaction of most people working within the field, and identifies outstanding issues still of importance to practitioners in the area. A final section discusses a range of literature which surveys aspects of Oceanic linguistics apart from its subgrouping.

This article follows the development of Malay from prehistorical times to the present. After a brief overview of the variety of languages in Southeast Asia and Oceania, the position of Malay within the Austronesian language family is discussed as well as the Malay homeland. The history of Malay is followed throughout its most important stages, from the period of the oldest written evidence in the late 7th century AD to the age of the Malaccan sultanate in the 15th-16th centuries, the colonial period in which Malay became the most important language in all domains of public life except in the highest echelons, and the present post-independence period in which Malay has become the national language in four states of Southeast Asia. Attention is also given to sociolinguistic differentiation, to foreign influences, to the engineering planning and manipulation of Malay in recent times and to its role as a vehicle for the spread of several religions and foreign (Indian, Mid-eastern, European) cultural influences.

New Guinea was settled by ancestors of present day Papuan-speaking communities 40,000 years ago. Between 3 and 5 millennia BP, waves of Austronesians (AN) followed and settled mostly on the offshore islands and along some coastal areas of the New Guinea mainland. According to a well-received view, AN Diaspora originated from Taiwan and dispersed from there to inhabit much of island Southeast Asia, Malagasy and islands of the South Pacific. Austronesian colonisation was augmented by their superior cultural traits including horticulture and marine technology. In their conquest they assimilated weaker, nomadic pre-AN aboriginal communities as was the case with the Negritos of northern Philippines; settled beside or with earlier sedentary communities as was the case in Western Melanesia; or settled on uninhabited islands in Eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia (Pawley & Ross, 1995). Beside demographic movements, other forces were at work. Trade-induced contact between Asia and New Guinea was in place before European contact. A trade link promoted by the Sultan of Tidor was extended to involve some communities of West New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) and the West Sepik Province some 5,000 years ago. As a result, trade items such as plumes of the kumul (bird of paradise), spices, sandalwood, aromatic barks and sea slugs from “islands of the coast of Western New Guinea “found their way into the Middle East markets about 4,000 years ago (Swadling, 1996). Other internal or external forces such as intermarriages and so on were at work also (see Bellwood, 1978). This fairly brief prehistory of what went on in the northern region of New Guinea raises questions about possible cross-cultural or cross-linguistic influences. Indeed, it does pose a challenge to those who endeavour to piece together a pre-linguistic history of lexical “ruins” found to suggest cognate relationships among languages of the northern region of New Guinea. This essay attempts to adumbrate a linguistic etymology of “loan cognates” that Abu', a Papuan language of the Torricelli Phylum of the central Sepik region, shares with AN languages. It commences with a list of lexical items and statements about their etymologies. This approach inescapably leads to a delineation of the kinds of attitudes the Abu' have towards foreign linguistic elements. The paper concludes with a typological statement about grammatical typology as an additional explanation to both the Papuan-Austronesian contact, and the trade-link theory as bases for the diffusion of areal or regional linguistic features among languages of the East Sepik and Sandaun (West Sepik) provinces.

The Spanish colonizers found a writing system in place when they established a permanent settlement in Manila in 1571. They took advantage of the widespread literacy in this indigenous script, which had spread by then from Manila to most of Luzon and parts of the Visayas, to help convert the inhabitants to Christianity by publishing a catechism printed in the script. Yet within a century, the use of the script had almost vanished. This paper explores the factors that led to the loss of literacy in the indigenous writing system.

As of August 1998, the Japanese language was the second most widely used language other than English on the Internet. It has from time to time been argued that the way in which the Japanese view their language contributes to a kind of language nationalism which functions to emphasise the separateness of the Japanese people from others in the affective as well as linguistic sense. In an extension of this debate, some have suggested that the continued use of the Japanese writing system in the computer age acts to reinforce a barrier between Japan and the rest of the world. This paper examines the issues involved in the language nationalism view of the Japanese script and argues that the use of characters on the Internet should be seen as nothing more than the continuation of an existing infrastructure.

A survey of the Maori Language in the 1970's indicated that only 18% of the Maori population of New Zealand were fluent speakers of the language. A survey in 1995 indicated that this had dropped to only 8%! The Ngati Kahungunu, like other tribes have long realized the impact of the onslaught of the English language. As with other indigenous and minority cultures throughout the world, they realize the urgency of the problem of potential death of their language. With the knowledge that the language has such a pivotal part to play in the total culture of any people, Ngati Kahungunu have adopted a “just do it” approach to language revitalisation strategies. This paper looks at some of the initiatives recently and presently carried out by Ngati Kahungunu to save its language from extinction. The paper also particularly highlights the methodology of “rumaki” or total immersion teaching of all subjects in the Maori language.

The Internet is a potentially non-coercive technology which has the capacity to facilitate the development and dissemination of locally-relevant and culturally-appropriate discourse. Many countries, especially those in Europe, have moved to utilise the Internet as a resource for expressing and revitalising their autochthonous languages, in response to cultural pressures from globalisation. However, there has been little evaluation of whether the Internet might give rise to a renaissance of indigenous language use in the postcolonial Asia-Pacific region. In this paper, we examine the case of the Philippines, which this year celebrates a centenary of independence from Spain, to determine whether introduction of the Internet has in fact enhanced the provision of indigenous language information services. We sampled 1% of the Internet sites listed in a popular search engine, in each second-level domain (educational, commercial, government and non-government organisations), and found very little evidence of indigenous language use in any of the sites in these categories. This suggests that the Internet has not yet realised its potential as a medium for indigenous language use in the Philippines, but that greater awareness of its capabilities in this arena might change the situation in the future.

This research focuses on three generations of Sindhi settlers in Malaysia with a view to determining their dominant language. A range of methodologies and constructs were used to disclose information which a domain based questionnaire approach in itself was not able to capture. The phenomena of codemixing and codeswitching not only of two but also of three languages emerged. Language choices varied not only across generations but also across gender within a generation. The functions for which the ethnic language was maintained also varied across generations.

This paper describes an experiment concerned with the relationship between word frequency and the speed of word recognition for Chinese. The aim is to determine whether the nature of the frequency-response time relationship that has been found to exist for English can be expected to be observed for Chinese as well. Word frequency effect is discussed in relation to the network models and the Search model of lexical access. The outcome of the experiment provides evidence in support of the Search model of lexical access.

This study investigated the nature of bilingual word recognition in English monolinguals and Chinese-English bilinguals. It has been argued that bilinguals have two interdependent language systems and that ability in one language can affect performance in the other according to orthographic depth (Frost & Katz, 1992) of the respective scripts. Reaction time and accuracy were recorded while participants (n=40) completed a continuous recognition task in which the orthographic depth of stimuli were varied. Results indicated that English monolinguals were more accurate than Chinese-English bilinguals at the phonological task, but less accurate at logographic (orthographic) tasks, while both groups performed at the same level with the English real word task. These results suggest that the orthographic depth of a bilingual's original language affects performance in the second language.

This paper discusses the background and use of the masked priming procedure in adult psycholinguistic research. Using this technique, we address the issue of how precise the letter and word processing systems of adults is for rapidly displayed stimuli. Data is reviewed that suggests that, for skilled readers, the letter and word recognition system is sensitively tuned to the discrimination demands imposed on it by the properties of the written language. That is, the recognition system is able to be discriminative where precision is required, but is also able to consider and use incomplete information when this is predictive.

The masked priming procedure has been widely used in adult psycholinguistic research as a means of exploring early and automatic processes in written word recognition (see Davis & Castles, this issue). In this paper, we discuss the recent extension of this technique for use in exploring written vocabulary development in children learning to read. We first report data to show that robust masked priming effects can be produced in children as young as seven years old. We then outline the results of some recent studies which illustrate how masked priming data can uncover the processes by which children access written word representations and the ways in which these processes may change over time.

Recent work has demonstrated that counts of which other words co-occur with a word of interest can reflect interesting properties of that word. We have studied aspects of this kind of methodology by systematically examining the effects of different combinations of parameters used in the preparation of co-occurrence statistics. Several psychologically relevant evaluation measures are used. We have found that successful performance on the evaluation tasks depends on the correct selection of parameters such as window size and distance metric.

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurological disorder which appears to be increasing in prevalence in the Asia-Pacific region among the elderly. Although PD is considered by many as a motor syndrome, its physiological basis in dopaminergic pathways has recently been associated with cognitive and neurolinguistic changes. This paper attempts to synthesise the common threads running through clinical and empirical work which has supported a specific cognitive word-finding deficit in PD. Recent computational accounts of the observed deficits are also reviewed as one way of testing theories of PD-like lexical-semantic errors, and generating empirically-testable hypotheses.

The present investigation examined older people's views on communication with younger and older adults to determine if older people's perceptions parallel research findings that suggest that young adults view intra-generational communication more positively than inter-generational communication. Additionally, drawing upon the Communication Predicament of Aging model (Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, & Henwood, 1986), it considers how these perceptions relate to psychological health. In a first study, older and younger adults from the United States of America responded to a questionnaire survey about their experiences of talking to older and younger adults. The results of analyses of variance suggested that younger adults have less positive perceptions of inter-generational communication than older adults. Regression analyses examined the link between communication climate and psychological health indices, and suggested that psychological health is related to inter-generational and intra-generational communication variables for older participants. In a second study, variations in older adults' intra- and intergroup perceptions were compared across the United States and the People's Republic of China. Unlike their American peers, intergenerational communication was not a significant correlate of adjustment in the Chinese sample, although intragenerational variables were again implicated.