ABSTRACT
For the purpose of this Encyclopedia the Australasia and the Pacific area is deemed to
include Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Irian Jaya and the other parts
of Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia, and all Pacific islands to the east and northeast of
Papua New Guinea. The Philippines and Taiwan also belong linguistically to Aus-
tralasia and the Pacific (in Taiwan only the original indigenous languages) and will be
touched upon here too. There are four types of indigenous languages in the Australasia and the Pacific
area – the very widespread, just under 1,200 interrelated Austronesian languages, the
about 780 Papuan languages of which 710 or a little more belong to five unrelated
large groups of languages (with two of these possibly related to each other), and
twenty unrelated small groups, with a dozen or so isolated languages. In Australia,
interrelated Aboriginal languages are found which originally may have numbered 500
or more just before the time of contact. A catastrophic smallpox epidemic which
started in Sydney around 1789 and is believed to have swept through many parts of Australia killing a considerable proportion of the Aboriginal population, is likely to
have caused the extinction of at least a hundred of the very small local languages.
Today, there are about twenty-five fully functional Aboriginal languages, about 120
threatened languages in various stages of endangerment, with at least fifty of them in
the last stages of disappearance, with only a few elderly speakers left. In addition,
about 170 other languages have become recently or relatively recently extinct, with
their last few elderly speakers dying during the last two decades or so. This gives a
total of about 320-30 languages to which quite a few long-extinct languages have to be added to arrive at a figure of about 400 languages a short time after the time of
contact. Only about a third of those are still surviving today, a good number of them
barely. On the positive side, efforts have been, or are being, undertaken to revive,
or reinvigorate, some dead or dying Aboriginal languages, with varying degrees of
success. By way of contrast, only about fifty languages have become recently or rela-
tively recently extinct in the Pacific (38 Austronesian and 11 Papuan languages),
though about 305 are threatened and in various degrees of endangerment, with fifty-
nine of them seriously or terminally endangered. The fourth group in this area are Austro-Asiatic languages in Peninsular Malaysia,
which constitute a very small portion of the large group of interrelated Austro-Asiatic
languages widespread in parts of Southeast Asia. They are not dealt with in this
Australasia and the Pacific section.
