South-West Pacific Research: Trends and Suggestions

Here we discuss the area of the Pacific that we refer to as the South-West Pacific. This includes the islands of New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji. This part of the Pacific has often been described as “Melanesia” in the literature. Throughout the South-West Pacific we find a great linguistic diversity, including speakers of both non-Austronesian languages and Austronesian languages. Austronesian speakers are found across the Pacific stretching from Taiwan, among the indigenous peoples, throughout South-East Asia across to the island of Madagascar off the eastern coast of the continent of Africa. The names that have been given to the islands of the South-West Pacific and the designations of different geographical areas in ethnological terms have been partly a product of colonial exploration and control as well as of the classifications made by anthropologists, linguists, and others