The Study of Language Use in Oceania

Abstract

Malinowski contributed the concept of as a mode of action to anthropology on the basis of his landmark study of Trobriand Island society and culture (77, 78). Appropriately, Oceania has become a focus for the comparative study of language use, an interest crossing the subdisciplinary boundaries of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, performance-based folklore, and sociolinguistics. Analysts in these areas share a concern with relating text to context that stems from Malinowski's emphasis on understanding utterances within their context of situation; they are also concerned with the pragmatic relationships between language use and social change (39, 96). Modern studies in the social uses of language date to the 1960s, with the rise of ethnoand sociolinguistics. An early interest in language style in Oceania was reflected in J. L. Fischer's 1971 comprehensive review of speech associated with respect situations, gender, oratory, etc in the Pacific islands (48). In sociolinguistics, the issue of language style soon became subsumed under two rapidly growing theoretical camps, correlational/ variationist sociolinguistics (70, 108, 110), and the ethnography of communication (58). Of these two camps, the former has concentrated on the study of dialects, code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, and pidgin and creole languages. Here a major concern has been to clarify the relationship between language variation and social processes, including the nature of linguistic differences and their social functions, the extent and nature of bilingualism or multilingualism in given situations, and the role of language in social