Current estimates suggest that there are approximately 6000 languages in the world, and over 1000 of these are spoken in Melanesia!!!!!!!!!! More striking still, some of these languages are extremely different from each other - so different that in this group of islands linguists have identified several linguistic families (for comparison, a well-known linguistic family is Indo-European, which includes languages spoken from India to Portugal….).

The two most distinctive groups of languages in Melanesia are the ~ 500 Austronesian languages (related to Southeast Asian and Polynesian languages) and a loose group of over 800 Papuan languages, themselves representing several linguistic families. These two groupings are thought to reflect two main colonisation events - an early one in the Pleistocene, and a much later one in the last 4000 years or so.

The distribution of Austronesian and Papuan languages raises a number of fascinating questions -

• Why are there so many languages in Melanesia?
• How much linguistic assimilation and replacement did the spread of Austronesian languages involve?
  
• How do linguistic and genetic boundaries compare?
• Why are some languages (Papuan or Austronesian) becoming more common and others extinct?
• Are Austronesian languages in island Melanesia still spreading?PIC 1
  Members of the project team arriving in the island of Savo, Solomon Is., where the rare Savosavo Papuan language is spoken.

These are only some of the un-answered questions regarding the fascinating languages of Melanesia, some of which are being investigated by the linguists, anthropologists and geneticists working in the project "Pioneers of Island Melanesia".

Members of the project team arriving in the island of Savo, Solomon Is., where the rare Savosavo Papuan language is spoken.

Interviewing John Suka, with the assistance of Hoke, in the village of Lokuru, Rendova Is., Solomon Is., where the rare Touo Papuan language is spoken.