Talk:Oceanic languages

Languages Mid‑importance

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Melanesia Mid‑importance

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Micronesia Mid‑importance

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Polynesia: Cook Islands / Niue / Samoa / Tonga / Tuvalu / American Samoa / French Polynesia / Pitcairn Islands / Tokelau / Wallis and Futuna Mid‑importance

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Changing Grouping[edit]

I'm thinking of changing the Oceanic grouping to follow Lynch, Ross and Crowley (2002) The Oceanic Languages. It doesn't differ too much from what is already here, but there are a few changes. If I do this, I'd make the changes, and add all the languages in the subgroups as well. Since this will require a significant amount of work, I thought I'd post this here for a bit before going ahead and doing it.--Sheena V 00:12, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me. I had been putting things up based on Ethnologue, but with a view to adding details from Lynch, Ross and Crowley (some of which I got around to doing). I have kind of lost steam on this project though, so knock yourself out. Conrad Leviston 12:53, 23 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me, too. I've been gathering up a head of steam tinkering with some of the PNG languages in the Huon Gulf region, where I did dissertation fieldwork in 1976. I've mostly been filling out descriptive data on Iwal and Numbami, but plan to add a bit on Labu (based on work by Jeff Siegel), and eventually on Yabem (Jabêm), which is very well documented, though not so much in English until recently. Joel 04:01, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Tolai Language[edit]

Article claims Tolai has over 100k speakers. Very Unlikely. Tolai language exists only at the southern end of NIP and around the Gazelle Peninsula. The unrelated Baining is spoken west of the Keravat River.Sulka is spoken only a few kms south of Blanche Bay, while other tribes and languages vanished before 1900 in the South Baining area.

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.245.138.42 (talk) 01:56, 21 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The size of the area a language is spoken in cannot be used to predict the number of speakers it has. That's methodically really naive. After all, population density is a crucial factor here – Singlish (the English-based Singaporean creole) likely has millions of speakers, Greenlandic has only 57,000 speakers overall. Moreover, Tolai has, importantly, also quite a lot of second-language speakers. If Tolai language does underestimate their number, it's completely possible that the number of Tolai speakers exceeds 100,000, though Ethnologue only gives 81,000 in all. Still, that's close, and the figures Ethnologue gives for first- and second-language speakers are both quite outdated. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:55, 3 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

LRC 2002 and Vanikoro et al.[edit]

The listing under the heading Lynch, Ross, & Crowley 2002 is not intended to be the most current listing and classification of Oceanic, but a listing in the 2002 work. As such, more recent work should not be used to change that listing, but should be included in a new section "Oceanic since 2002" or some such. --Taivo (talk) 23:24, 9 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't seen this comment so far, but I would like to ask why are Ethnologue and ABVD classifications removed?--MacedonianBoy (talk) 13:51, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Verifying[edit]

Verifying subarticles with Ross et al. 2002. Finished all but SOc. — kwami (talk) 11:06, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In the case of SOc, I'm afraid I may have undone some unreferenced updates from Clark (2009). — kwami (talk) 01:51, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Oceanic Languages, Their Grammatical Structure, Vocabulary, and Origin By Daniel Macdonald[edit]

The Oceanic Languages, Their Grammatical Structure, Vocabulary, and Origin By Daniel Macdonald

http://books.google.com/books?id=5nE7P1MaBmkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 04:58, 12 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]