The Pacific is historically an area of enormous linguistic
diversity, where talk figures as a central component of social
life. Pacific communities also represent diverse contact zones,
where between indigenous and introduced institutions and ideas;
between local actors and outsiders; and involving different lingua
franca, colonial, and local language varieties. Contact between
colonial and post-colonial governments, religious institutions, and
indigenous communities has spurred profound social change,
irrevocably transforming linguistic ideologies and practices.
Drawing on ethnographic and linguistic analyses, this edited volume
examines situations of intertwined linguistic and cultural change
unfolding in specific Pacific locations in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries. Its overarching concern is with the
multiple ways that processes of historical change have shaped and
been shaped by linguistic ideologies reflexive sensibilities about
languages and language useheld by Pacific peoples and other agents
of change. The essays demonstrate that language and linguistic
practices are linked to changing consciousness of self and
community through notions of agency, morality, affect, authority,
and authenticity. In times of cultural contact, communities often
experience language change at an accelerated rate. This is
particularly so in small-scale communities where innovations and
continuity routinely depend on the imagination, creativity, and
charisma of fewer individuals. The essays in this volume provide
evidence of this potential and a record of their voices, as they
document new types of local actors, e.g., pastors, Bible
translators, teachers, political activists, spirit mediums, and
tour guides, some of whom introduce, innovate, legitimate, or
resist new ideas and ways to express them through language. Drawing
on and transforming metalinguistic concepts, local actors (re)shape
language, reproducing and changing the communicative economy. In
the process, they cultivate new cultural conceptions of language,
for example, as a medium for communicating religious knowledge and
political authority, and for constructing social boundaries and
transforming relationships of domination.
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