Introduction

The Pacific is a vast area containing a large number of indigenous languages, Asian mainland languages, half a dozen European languages and a number of pidgins and creoles. Here I will take the Pacific to include the island nations and territories of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (excluding Australia and New Zealand). These three areas are taken by geographers and others to comprise Oceania. Micronesia includes the island groups east of the Philippines and north of the equator. They include, for example, the Mariana, Marshall, Caroline and Gilbert Islands and have a land area of about 1,335 square miles. Melanesia comprises the island groups in the southwestern Pacific extending southeastwards from the Admiralty Islands to Fiji and includes such nations as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. Polynesia consists of a group of islands in the eastern and southeastern Pacific extending from New Zealand north to Hawaii and east to Easter Island.

This section includes papers representing two of the areas of Oceania, namely, Melanesia (Mühlhäusler on Tok Pisin, and Siegel on English in Fiji) and Polynesia (Sato on English in Hawaii). Despite the considerable interest in Oceania on the part of anthropologists and linguists (see Watson-Gegeo 1986 for an overview of research on the use of indigenous languages), to my knowledge no systematic studies have been done on the history and use of English (or any other European language such as German) in Micronesia, so this area is not represented here.