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Ethnologue (15th ed.)
Languages of the Pacific Islands by 
Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin Before Pidgin English by
This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It offers linguistic and sociohistorical substantiation for a regional Eastern Polynesian-based pidgin, and challenges conventional Eurocentric assumptions about early colonial contact in the eastern Pacific by arguing that Maritime Polynesian Pidgin preceded the introduction of Pidgin English by as much as a century. Emanuel J. Drechsel not only opens up new methodological avenues for historical-sociolinguistic research in Oceania by a combination of philology and ethnohistory, but also gives greater recognition to Pacific Islanders in early contact between cultures. Students and researchers working on language contact, language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will want to read this book. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in Eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.
| (1). Google Scholar (2-min video): Change the library links settings to connect to our scholarly journal articles. Example: language New Guinea | |
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(2). Search smarter with Google (2-min video): For example: |
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(3). JSTOR has a good collection of research articles and book chapters. |
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(4). EBSCO Research Databases (2-min video) - some journal articles. |
Let's Learn Maori by
Let's Learn Maori comprises a textbook and self-help guide to the study of the Maori language. It is also a complete grammar reference, covering parts of speech, the structure of each type of phrase and the combinations of phrases that form simple sentences. Each aspect of the grammar is discussed in a numbered section or subsection of the book and a combined vocabulary and index provides a reference system.
Bislama Reference Grammar by
Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with at least 80 actively spoken Oceanic languages used by about 200,000 people. Bislama began as a plantation pidgin based on English in the nineteenth century, but it has since developed into a unique language with a grammar and vocabulary very different from English. It is one of very few national languages for which there is no readily available reference grammar. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive account of the grammar of Bislama as it is used by ordinary Ni-Vanuatu. It does not, therefore, aim to describe any kind of artificial written norm but sets out to capture a range of different kinds of ways that Ni-Vanuatu will say things in various contexts, both written and spoken, formal and informal. The thrust of this volume is to show that Bislama has a grammar--an unfamiliar concept for those educated in Vanuatu. It also shows that Bislama is a language of considerable complexity, which will come as a surprise to many of its users, who have been taught to view their language as somehow "simple" and even "deficient."
A Comparative Study of the Melanesian Island Languages by
Sidney Herbert Ray (1858-1939) was a gifted linguist and teacher, known in particular for his study of the languages of Melanesia and the attendant islands. In this 1928 publication, one of his most famous works, Ray does an exhaustive study of the languages spoken on each island in the region from the Loyalty Islands to the Solomon Islands, and includes a brief survey of the early records of Melanesian languages. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of linguistics or the linguistics of the Pacific isles.
A Dictionary of Owa: A Language of the Solomon Islands by
From 1963 to 2011 Pacific Linguistics, located at the Australian National University, published over six hundred books concerned with the languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia. The Mouton Pacific Linguistics series represents a continuation of this publishing venture under the same Editorial Board. The Pacific Linguistics series presents linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, and other materials concerned with languages of this region. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world, and its publications are refereed by international scholars with relevant expertise. Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on the languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas, read by scholars with an interest in the region as well as by linguists with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history. Pacific Linguistics is proud to act as a vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge about the languages of the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, many of which are little known, and to bring them to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.
A Grammar of South Efate: An Oceanic Language of Vanuatu by
This book presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of PortVila. It is one of the first such grammars to take seriously the provision of primary data for the verification of claims made in the analysis. The research is set in the context of increasing attention being paid to the state of the world's smaller languages and their prospects for being spoken into the future. In addition to providing an outline of the grammar of the language, the author describes the process of developing an archivable textual corpus that is used to make example sentences citable and playable, using software (Audiamus) developed in the course of the research. An included DVD provides a dictionary and finderlist, a set of interlinearized example texts and elicited sentences, and playable media versions of most example sentences and of the example texts.
The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area by
The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of all major regions of the world. The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families and major languages of each area within the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of many of the languages. The volume also includes a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact. It will make accessible current knowledge on this complex region, and will be the standard reference on the region. It is aimed at typologists, endangered language specialists, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and all those interested in linguistic diversity and understanding this least known linguistic region.
Spoken Marshallese: An Intensive Language Course by
Spoken Marshallese is designed to fill the need for a basic text in the language of the Marshall Islands. It will give students a fluency in the language and a feeling for its structure, enabling him or her to converse freely on a broad range of subjects without additional formal instruction. The Marshallese-English Dictionary, by Takaji Abo, Byron W. Bender, Alfred Capelle, and Tony DeBrum, would be useful as a supplement to this text.
The Trobriand Islanders' Ways of Speaking by
Bronislaw Maliniowski claimed in his monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific that to approach the goal of ethnographic field-work, requires a "collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae ... as a corpus inscriptionum, as documents of native mentality". This book finally meets Malinowski's demand. Based on more than 40 months of field research the author presents, documents and illustrates the Trobriand Islanders' own indigenous typology of text categories or genres, covering the spectrum from ditties children chant while spinning a top, to gossip, songs, tales, and myths. The typology is based on Kilivila metalinguistic terms for these genres, and considers the relationship they have with registers or varieties which are also metalinguistically distinguished by the native speakers of this language. Rooted in the 'ethnography of speaking' paradigm and in the 'anthropological linguistics/linguistic anthropology' approach, the book highlights the relevance of genres for researching the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction, and demonstrates the importance of understanding genres for achieving linguistic and cultural competence. In addition to the data presented in the book, its readers have the opportunity to access the original audio- and video-data presented via the internet on a special website, which mirrors the structure of the book. Thus, the reader can check the transcriptions against the original data recordings. This makes the volume particularly valuable for teaching purposes in (general, Austronesian/ Oceanic, documentary, and anthropological) linguistics and ethnology.
Spoken Marshallese: An Intensive Language Course by
Spoken Marshallese is designed to fill the need for a basic text in the language of the Marshall Islands. It will give students a fluency in the language and a feeling for its structure, enabling him or her to converse freely on a broad range of subjects without additional formal instruction. The Marshallese-English Dictionary, by Takaji Abo, Byron W. Bender, Alfred Capelle, and Tony DeBrum, would be useful as a supplement to this text.
Borrowing: A Pacific perspective by 
Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? by 
Language Endangerment and Language Revitalization by 
Language Diversity Endangered by 
Hawaiian Grammar by
This is the definitive grammar of the Hawaiian language. Indeed it is the first attempt at a comprehensive treatment of the subject since W. D. Alexander published his concise Short Synopsis of the Most Essential Points in Hawaiian Grammar in 1864. This grammar is intended as a companion to the Hawaiian Dictionary, by the same authors. The grammar was written with every student of the Hawaiian language in mind--from the casual interested layperson to the professional linguist and grammarian. Although it was obviously impossible to avoid technical terms, their use was kept to a minimum, and a glossary is included for those who need its help. Each point of grammar is illustrated with examples, many from Hawaiian-language literature.
Spoken Chamorro: With Grammatical Notes and Glossary by 
Pidgin to Da Max Hana Hou by  |
joy.oehlers@hawaii.edu |
