Pacific Linguistics logo and title

Announcement

We are delighted to announce that, from mid 2012, Pacific Linguistics will become the Pacific Linguistics monograph series published by De Gruyter Mouton in Berlin. The series will focus primarily on linguistic descriptions, dictionaries and high quality reference materials for the languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia.

Also, the Studies in Language Change subseries will become an independent DGM series.

Additionally, publishing of open access volumes, journals, teaching materials and other books that are not within the scope of the DGM series will continue to be managed out of the Department of Linguistics (School of Culture, History & Language) at the ANU, under the banner Asia-Pacific Linguistics. We are already distributing the free electronic publications under the new series title Asia-Pacific Linguistics Open Access.

Both the DGM Pacific Linguistics monographs and the Asia-Pacific Linguistics publications will be overseen by the same Editorial Board and Managing Editor, ensuring the continuation of high academic standards.

From when it began in 1963, Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas. Over 600 books have been published, most on lesser-known languages. The series has brought these to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.

The move of the monograph series to DGM will give these publications exposure to a larger audience, including those with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history.

The procedure for submitting book proposals is available here. Authors are now required to provide camera ready copy after book proposals have been accepted and review and revision of texts has been completed to the satifiaction of the Editorial Board. The style sheet for camera-ready copy on the De Gruyter Mouton website here. Do not spend time formatting your texts before they have been accepted and you are requested to do so.

For submissions to the Asia-Pacific Linguistics series, please contact the Managing Editor directly to discuss your publishing options (e.g. electronic versus print, open access versus sale) and to receive advice on the preparation of a formal proposal.

Paul Sidwell (Managing Editor)
on behalf of the Editorial Board
May 2012

All our publications currently in print are listed on the catalogue page. Out-of-print publications are available in PDF format, and the Out of Print Catalogue is available as a PDF. There are also pages here devoted to teaching materials in the region's major lingua francas, bibliographies, and the Studies in Language Change series.

There are various ways of contacting us.

ICAAL proceedings New!
Austroasiatic Studies: Papers from ICAAL 4, vols. 1 & 2

The proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics may be downloaded free of charge.

Mali Mali (Baining) grammar Tonya N. Stebbins

Mali is a Papuan language of the Baining family, spoken on the Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The family has five members: Kaket, Mali, Simbali, Ura and Kairak. Baining people share a common non-Austronesian ancestral language and similar cultural practices (such as fire dances). An interesting feature of these languages is that they show a great deal of influence from their early Austronesian neighbors. This is the first comprehensive grammar for a Baining language and provides a framework for further comparative and descriptive research in the region. The grammar has been published alongside a dictionary and text collection (also available from Pacific Linguistics).

Malgana A salvage grammar of Malgana, the language of Shark Bay, Western Australia Andrew Gargett

There are no longer any speakers of the West Australian Aboriginal language Malgana who have any degree of fluency, and the series of analyses in this report are based on data from audio tapes made in the middle of the last decade of the 20th century, as well as various written materials produced over more than 150 years. This grammar is therefore an attempt to salvage from the scarce material available as complete a description of Malgana as possible.

Tamambo Tamambo, the language of west Malo, Vanuatu Dorothy G. Jauncey

Tamambo is a previously undescribed language of northern Vanuatu, now spoken by approximately 4000 people. It is a conservative Oceanic language, reflecting many of the consonant phonemes posited for Proto Oceanic (POc); lexically, many Tamambo words are reflexes of those posited for POc. This is a grammatical description of Tamambo; it is a nominative-accusative language, and is primarily head-marking. The description includes analysis of the considerable derivational morphology, possessive constructions, serial verb constructions, and an animacy hierarchy that interrelates with various aspects of the grammar.

 Oceanic lexicon Animals New!
Dynamics of human diversity: the case of mainland Southeast Asia Edited by N. J. Enfield

Our languages, our genetics, our material cultures, our social organization are woven together by the ancient processes of change and diversification that produce the rich diversity we see today. What are these processes and how do they work? Dynamics of human diversity looks at these questions with a focus on one of the most fascinating sites of human diversity worldwide: mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA). In this book, experts on MSEA bring together the latest advances. Special attention is paid to two case studies of human diversity in MSEA: the Aslian peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, and the origin and diversification of the Austroasiatic languages.

Walsh festschrift Indigenous language and social identity: papers in honour of Michael Walsh edited by Brett Baker, Ilana Mushin, Mark Harvey and Rod Gardner

For almost 40 years, Michael Walsh has been working alongside Indigenous people: documenting language, music and other traditional knowledge, acting on behalf of claimants to land in the Northern Territory, and making crucial contributions to the revitalisation of Aboriginal languages in NSW. This volume, with contributions from colleagues and students, celebrates his abiding interest in and commitment to Indigenous society with papers on two broad themes. ‘Language, identity and country’ addresses the often complex relations between Aboriginal social groups and countries, and linguistic identity. In ‘Language, identity and social action’ authors discuss the role that language plays in maintaining social identities in the realms of conversation, story-telling, music, language games, and in education. The volume will be of interest to students of linguistics, Indigenous studies, anthropology, and sociology.

Bindanderean The Binanderean languages of Papua New Guinea: reconstruction and subgrouping Jacinta Smallhorn

This book breaks new ground with a historical-comparative study of the Binanderean languages of the Morobe and Oro Provinces of southeast mainland Papua New Guinea, a subgroup of the Trans New Guinea family. The author reconstructs the phonology, core lexicon, and some bound morphology of Proto Binandere. She uses shared innovations to construct a family tree, and also discusses the occurrence of parallel phonological changes among Binanderean languages. Binanderean lexical and morphological data are then compared with those of Guhu-Samane, a language long considered to be the closest external relative of the Binanderean family. Evidence of this relationship is presented, along with grounds for excluding it from the family. Finally, the author gives lexical comparisons between Binanderean and four other putative eastern New Guinea subgroups of the Trans New Guinea family, and shows that Binanderean is indeed a likely member of the family.