The languages of Melanesia: Quantifying the level of coverage

Abstract

The present paper assesses the state of grammatical description of the languages of the Melanesian region based on database of semi-automatically annotated aggregated bibliographical references. 150 years of language description in Melanesia has produced at least some grammatical information for almost half of the languages of Melanesia, almost evenly spread among coastal/non-coastal, Austronesian/non-Austronesian and isolates/large families. Nevertheless, only 15.4% of these languages have a grammar and another 18.7% have a grammar sketch. Compared to Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, the Papua-Austronesian region is the region with the largest number of poorly documented languages and the largest proportion of poorly documented languages. We conclude with some dicussion and remarks on the documentational challenge and its future prospects.