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.

An emerging unemployment issue has been the growing number of job seekers who have been out of work for very long periods of time. Those who have been unemployed for 5 years or more, the chronic long-term unemployed (CLTU), are the subject of this research. This paper reports on the results of an assessment of 47 CLTU job seekers undertaken as part of a strategy aimed at identifying needs and generating return-to-work strategies for this group. Variables investigated were general ability (Standard Progressive Matrices, de Lemos, 1989), literacy (ACER Applied Reading Test, van den Berg & Woff, 1990), mental health (General Health Questionnaire, Goldberg, 1978; Symptom Checklist-90-R, Derogatis, 1983; State of Anxiety and Depression Scale, Bedford, Foulds & Sheffield, 1976) and work commitment. The CLTU differed from the general population on intellectual and reading ability by being over-represented in the lower ranges. The group reported mental health levels poorer than non-patient normative samples, but above levels of psychiatric in- or out-patients. Despite this, the CLTU reported high levels of work commitment. These initial findings point to the special needs of the CLTU. Implications for policy makers and those working with the unemployed are highlighted.

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.

Maslow's (1954) theory of a hierarchy of human needs has generated little research, perhaps because of the lack of specific, concrete operationalisation of concepts such as ‘psychological well-being’ and basic need satisfaction. The Need Satisfaction Inventory (NSI: Lester, 1990) was developed to measure basic need satisfaction and 157 undergraduate subjects completed both it and the Beck Depression (BDI) and Anxiety Inventories (BAI), as well as Spielberger's (1986) Anger-Expression questionnaire (AX). The latter three questionnaires represent an operationalisation of Spielberger, Ritterband, Sydeman, Reheiserdc Unger's (1995) notion that emotions act as indicators of psychological well-being. The hypothesis that scores on the NSI would be significantly correlated with the BDI, BAI, and AX was supported. Ss also completed the Richins and Dawson (1992) materialism index, and it was hypothesised that if hoarding material goods does in fact represent compensatory neurotic behaviour, then materialism would also be negatively correlated with the NSI. The hypothesis was confirmed, providing further evidence for Maslow's (1970) theory that basic need satisfaction is associated with psychological health. However, in the absence of norms for the NSI, there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that basic needs reside in a consistent, and strict global hierarchy.

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.

The purpose of this study was to identify the perceptions and consequences associated with the closing of a sugar plantation company for a group of Japanese American plantation workers who were born and raised on the plantation. These workers were the children of Japanese immigrants who had come to Hawaii at the turn of century to plant and harvest sugar. The participants were thirty nisei (second generation) Japanese-American male residents of a rural plantation community in Hawaii. Using the techniques of participant observation, interviewing, and record research, the study explored the worker's (1) perceptions of change, (2) evaluations of perceived change, (3) stresses resulting from change, (4) coping strategies, and (5) future expectations. These subjective dimensions of change were examined across eight major areas of community life (i.e., employment, housing, community relations, community services, family life, education, physical environment, and crime). The data were analyzed to determine perceptions, evaluations, and stresses resulting from community change and to identify strategies used to cope with community change. The impact of change on resident attitudes and lifestyle patterns are discussed and summarized under three major themes: (1) communal versus individualistic lifestyles, (2) association versus dissociation of employment and the community, and (3) continuity versus discontinuity of life in the plantation.

Personal comments of workers are presented to demonstrate the utility and significance of the present research approach in assessing individual experiences in response to social changes. An understanding of the impact of change on resident attitudes, beliefs, and lifestyle patterns provides the basis for devising change programs that are sensitive to the social and psychological needs of individuals affected by the changes.

Qualitative research methods were used to explore the dynamics of racist bullying of, and retaliation by. Aboriginal students in a large, predominantly White, urban high school. Transcripts of recorded interviews and discussion groups with 11 Aboriginal students aged between 13 and 17 were analysed. Bullying by White students mainly took the form of verbal abuse, whereas retaliation by Aboriginal students was predominantly in the form of physical attacks. Aboriginal students tended to deal with bullying at the peer group level rather than by seeking adult intervention. This appears to have been because of poor teacher response and institutional racism. Recommendations are made for dealing with bullying issues in the school setting, and for future research.

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.

Choosing a response format is a problem when designing computerised tests. Programmers often solve this problem by highlighting a response option and allowing the user to select this option or choose another by using the cursor keys. It is possible that such well-meaning attempts to make computers more user-friendly may heighten response style tendencies. The two experiments to be reported in this study were designed to test the effect of cursor positioning in personality and ability tests. In the first experiment, sixty two Participants were randomly assigned to two groups and asked to complete computerised versions of Forms A and B of the Eysenck Personality Inventory. The position of the highlight was manipulated to produce a two-by-two factorial design with repeated measures on one factor. Results showed that there was evidence of a cursor effect but that it was confined to one of the conditions in the design. Experiment two employed the same sort of manipulation in a computerised version of the ACER Word Knowledge Test with another sample of 36 Participants. Here, no evidence was found for any effect of cursor positioning. Overall, it was concluded that the highlighting technique itself is unlikely to have any effect on measures of cognitive ability but that it may have some effect in the more subjective personality testing domain.

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.